About the Book

Four girls share a cabin on their school retreat – in an abandoned town where the ghost of Smiling Jack is known to haunt the isolated campers.

SHELLEY is the new girl with her own haunted past.

MACK made things awkward by kissing her best friend.

PRIYA thinks she’s ready to take the next step with her boyfriend.

RAFFI has a flair for drama, and convinces them all to hold a seance.

But when you call on the darkness, sometimes the darkness replies . . .

For my sister, Jo

Content Warning

This book contains mature themes, violence, explicit scenes and point-of-view depictions of trauma and psychological distress. Reader discretion is advised.

Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

SEPTEMBER 2000

SHELLEY

The bus was still twenty minutes out of Troubridge when Shelley felt a warm blot between her thighs. She’d been dozing, forehead resting against the window as Killing Heidi’s Reflector played on her Discman, but now she sat straighter, her heart drumming a panicked not-now, not-now, not-now. Her period wasn’t due for another week and she didn’t have anything with her. Not even a jumper to tie around her waist. Outside, the landscape had flattened to alien terrain. Pink sand, milky salt pans and rust-hued shrubs beaten low beneath an acid-washed sky. She crossed her legs, willing her body to contain itself until she could slip to the loos when they stopped for lunch.

Agreeing to go on Year Eleven Retreat had been a mistake. Two-and-a-half hours into the trip, and her new classmates had picked over the weekend’s gossip and finished the quizzes in that month’s Dolly magazine. Now the air was stuffy with their boredom. To Shelley it felt like a noxious gas, waiting for a spark. Prickly heat spread across her skin and the first stirrings of cramp ached deep in her abdomen. She should have pulled a sickie. Broken an arm or a leg – the pain couldn’t be worse than two nights in a ghost town with twenty-six strangers and minimal adult supervision.

At her old school, Retreat, or ‘camp’ in the common tongue, was a week with her whole year level sleeping on the gym floor of the Mt Stirling community centre. They ate soggy tomato and cheese sandwiches and did a high ropes course, archery and orienteering. Posh schools, Shelley was learning, had less-conventional ideas. St Augustine’s took its Year Elevens, one form group at a time, to Baynton, an abandoned mining town secreted in the heart of Chalky Flats National Park at the foot of the Sturt Peninsula – a four-hour drive from the city. Students were billeted to the miners’ former lodgings and expected to cook and fend for themselves. It was supposed to be an exercise in independence. An opportunity for peer bonding, spiritual enrichment and self-reflection before they embarked (the school’s word, not Shelley’s) on their final year. In a nutshell, it was The Lord of the Flies waiting to happen.

But Shelley’s mum, who had not set foot in a high school in the past quarter-century, saw Retreat as the perfect opportunity for Shelley to make friends before she officially started at St Augustine’s next term. She was lucky, her mother had reminded her at drop off, that St Augustine’s was willing to accept her so late in the year and should be thankful that her grandparents had agreed to help with the fees. God, she was never going to hear the end of how much it was costing to send her to a place she had no desire to be. But her parents had shut down Shelley’s suggestion of home-schooling, and nowhere else would take her at such short notice – not after what had happened at her old school.

When the bus pulled into the Troubridge recreation grounds, Shelley’s underwear felt sodden and she was certain there’d be a stain on the seat of her cargo pants when she stood up. She decided the best way to avoid becoming a ‘How Embarrassment’ feature in next month’s Dolly was to stay put until her new classmates left, then make a dash for the bathrooms. She made slow business of hunting for something in her backpack and had almost convinced herself that she had the situation under control, when a boy in a backwards Crows cap from the row behind poked her on the shoulder.

‘You moving or not?’

‘Oh, um, no. I –’

‘Everyone off, and be quick about it!’ bellowed Mr Wallace, one of their two supervising teachers. He wore wire-framed glasses straight out of the eighties and a put-upon expression, as though being around teenagers and their antics gave him a permanent headache. He stuck his head back through the door and saw Shelley still sitting down. ‘That includes you, Ms Martin. Stretch your legs! Get the blood flowing!’

If only he knew.

The boy widened his eyes at Shelley: What are you waiting for?

Shit.

She took a deep breath as she stood up and tried to angle her backpack off one shoulder to cover her bum as she started down the aisle. Maybe her flow wasn’t as heavy as she thought. Maybe nobody would notice. After all, someone would need to be looking, checking her out, to see –

‘Ugh, gross! New girl’s arse is a crime scene.’

There was a whooshing in Shelley’s ears and her body became a pillar of flame as twenty-six pairs of eyes strained to get a view of her backside. Girls looked mortified on her behalf, turning away to whisper behind their hands. A few of the boys made disgusted vomit sounds. Someone guffawed. Shelley willed herself not to cry.

‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’

Darkness furred the edges of Shelley’s vision and she dug her fingers into the seat ahead to keep herself upright. This was a disaster. She’d been naive to imagine it could be any different. But when she summoned the courage to turn and face her accuser, she saw that the girl who had spoken was standing up from the double seat she had to herself to glare at the boy in the Crows cap. She was short and athletic in track pants and a St Augustine’s rugby jumper, her swing of dark hair pulled into a high ponytail and her eyes narrowed to blades. ‘Why are you staring at her arse, Kyle?’

‘She’s bleeding.’ He made it sound like a criminal offence.

The girl rolled her eyes. ‘It’s not blood: it’s uterine lining. And it’s not going to hurt you.’

Shelley felt her soul leave her body. She was dead. Salt and burn her bones, there was no coming back from this.

At least Kyle had turned his sights on the other girl.

‘I forgot. This shit’s your jam.’ He waggled his tongue through the V of his fingers. ‘Finger lickin’ good, ay, Mack?’

A trio of his friends in oversized T-shirts and footy jerseys laughed as though this were the put-down of the year.

The girl gave him a sweet, dangerous smile. ‘Comments like that are the reason you’ll never find out, Kyle.’

Mr Wallace poked his head back through the door a second time. ‘What’s the hold-up here, folks?’

‘Mack and the new girl are giving us an anatomy lesson,’ Kyle said with a smirk.

Mack regarded him with pure venom.

Shelley willed herself into dust.

‘Well, they can continue outside. And turn that frown upside down, Ms Whitmore. No sour grapes on my bus. Go eat your lunch and get some air. We roll again in fifteen minutes.’

Alone in the girls’ loos, Shelley locked herself in one of the stalls and felt the last of her resolve give way. The tears she’d been holding back escaped in noisy sobs as she struggled to wind a wad of toilet paper around the crotch of her knickers to tide her over until she could access the emergency pads in her duffel. She was still hiccupping – still trying to pull herself together enough to unlock the door, splash water on her face and command her legs to carry her back across the car park to face her new classmates – when the outside door opened and sneakered footsteps echoed across the concrete.

‘Shelley?’

She recognised Mack’s voice from the bus.

Go away, go away, go away, she willed.

‘You in here?’ A light brown fist appeared beneath the stall door and uncurled in a flash of electric blue nail polish to offer a tampon. ‘My cycle’s unpredictable too. I figured you might need this.’

Shelley muttered her thanks and hoped Mack would leave her in peace, but she was still leaning against the wall by the paper-towel dispenser when Shelley emerged to wash her hands.

‘You didn’t need to wait for me.’

‘I wanted to. Kyle served up a real arsehole’s welcome back there. You okay?’ Mack asked, cocking an eyebrow.

Shelley dared a glance at her reflection in the rust-freckled mirror. Her face was still blotchy and flushed with shame and her eyes were red-rimmed.

‘I was hoping to avoid the whole “crying in the toilets on my first day” cliché, but I’ll survive.’ She gave Mack a rueful smile. ‘Thanks for sticking up for me.’

‘Any excuse to take Kyle Lynton and his cronies down a notch.’ Mack stuck out her hand. A handmade bracelet of rainbow beads glinted on her wrist. ‘Mack Whitmore.’

‘Shelley.’

‘Shelley Martin – I know. You’re bunking with me, Raffi and Priya in Overseer’s Lodge.’ Mack looked sheepish. ‘We were supposed to introduce ourselves before we left, but I guess we missed you?’

Shelley felt a guilty twinge. After everything that had happened at Belair High, her goal at St Augustine’s was to be wallpaper. She wasn’t there to make friends, or an impression of any kind. When her mum dropped her at the gates that morning, she’d made a beeline for the bus and secured a free double seat where she slouched low with her headphones on, her backpack blocking the seat beside her, and a book open in her lap for good measure. Only, as it turned out, her body had other plans.

‘Here, tie this around your waist.’ Mack pulled off her jumper and offered it to Shelley. ‘I feel semi-responsible for what happened back there.’

‘Thanks, but it’s not your fault,’ Shelley assured her. ‘The boys at my old school were just as bad.’

Slut. Witch. Filthy whore. The old taunts cut fresh wounds.

‘You were at Belair High, right?’

Shelley’s mouth went dry and a migraine triggered behind her right eye, making her vision pulse red.

‘I don’t mean to stickybeak. It’s just Ms Lim mentioned it and I, uh . . .’ Mack lowered her voice. ‘I read in the paper about the boy who died. I’m really sorry. It must have been awful.’

Leaves stuck to the blood on her hands and her white shirt soaked crimson. Her feet slipping on fallen pine needles as she ran through the trees . . . Shelley shut her eyes, trying to block the memory.

‘It was an accident,’ she muttered, realising a beat too late that Mack hadn’t asked. Misadventure: that was the coroner’s official finding.

‘Were you close?’ Mack pressed.

Matthew’s fingertips smoothed her hair behind her ear and his breath was warm against her cheek. ‘You’re so beautiful, Shelley.’

She shook her head. ‘He was in the year above.’ True, but a splinter of the whole.

‘One minute, Saints!’ Mr Wallace bellowed from the car park. ‘The bus leaves in one minute!’

Mack rolled her eyes. ‘We’re summoned. Sit with me the rest of the way?’

Shelley would’ve preferred to space out listening to her music for the remainder of the trip, or better yet, hide in the loos until the bus left, but Mack didn’t seem prepared to take no for an answer.

‘Sure,’ she agreed, already panicking over what they’d find to talk about for the next hour. ‘Give me a minute. I’ll catch up.’

Mack squeezed her arm, misreading her apprehension. ‘Don’t worry about Kyle; everyone knows he’s a waste of space. And whatever happened at your old school, it’s ancient history. You’re a Saint now.’

Shelley tried for a smile as she watched her leave and wondered whether Mack would have been so quick to stick up for her had she known the truth.

Alone again, she lifted her gaze to the mirror and met the dark wells of a dead boy’s blinded gaze.

‘Matthew?’

His name was a ghosting kiss. Blood on her tongue.

Shelley wanted to believe she was imagining things. That she had left him and the damaged parts of herself in the trees at Weemala Reserve on that hellish afternoon. And that St Augustine’s would be a fresh start. But his image lingered when she closed her eyes, and her period, heavy and out of sync, felt like a bad omen; the horror she held within seeping through.

MACK

Mack was relieved to have someone to sit next to for what remained of the trip, even if Shelley wasn’t much inclined to talk. Almost as soon as Ms Lim drove the bus back onto the highway, Shelley opened one of the wizard/boarding-school books everyone was obsessed with and deflected Mack’s questions with reluctant, one-word answers. Mack didn’t blame her.

When Ms Lim had announced that there’d be a new student joining them on Retreat, Mack had volunteered to be Shelley’s buddy. She remembered the terror of her own first day four years earlier, and the relief she’d felt when Raffi, also new, had taken the seat beside her in their first class and suggested they skip the getting-to-know-each-other bit, declare themselves best friends and see if it stuck. So far it had – Raffi had a witchy way of intuiting these things – and Mack had planned to be waiting at the gate with her and Priya to welcome Shelley when she arrived. Instead, she’d slept badly and barely made it to the bus on time, forgetting all about Shelley until Kyle Lynton thrust her in the spotlight. She promised herself that she would make it up to Shelley in Baynton. Retreat would be fun. And they would have the best time. But even as she thought it, her gaze travelled across the aisle to the halo of Raffi’s curls frizzing above the seat two rows ahead, and the sick feeling that had kept her up half the night intensified.

‘Headphones off, people!’ Mr Wallace’s voice crackled through the bus’s microphone, making her jump. ‘While I’ve got a captive audience, let’s talk ground rules. Contrary to stories you may have heard from your older siblings, Baynton is not your personal playground, but a site of historical significance. The town was established in 1913 for the purpose of mining gypsum from Baynton Lake. At its peak it was home to almost two hundred people; however, mining operations ceased in 1930 following the collapse of the construction industry during the Great Depression.

‘Today, volunteers and park rangers work hard to preserve both the ruins and surrounding bushland. While the lodges are private accommodation, the town is open to park guests during daylight hours and we expect you to tread lightly and prove yourselves worthy ambassadors of the school. That means no littering, no defacing or damaging property and no lewd or obnoxious behaviour of any kind. Are we clear?’

A few students muttered their assent, but most were still thumbing their Gameboys or chatting among themselves. Mr Wallace frowned and adjusted the microphone so that it gave a static shriek. In the driver’s seat, Ms Lim startled and swerved with a ‘Jesus, Greg!’ that got most students’ attention.

Mr Wallace raised his voice above their sniggers. ‘Are we clear, Eleven C?’

This time, the form replied in chorus. ‘Yes, sir!’

‘Tomorrow we’ll visit other historical landmarks within the park, but for tonight, no one is to venture unsupervised beyond the town gate or swim in Baynton Lake. Ms Lim and I are staying in the Gatehouse at the town’s entrance and will be making spot visits to each of your lodges to ensure that you’re using your time constructively.

‘Should you need to reach us in case of an emergency after dark, we ask that you travel with a buddy along the town’s main path and otherwise remain in your assigned lodges.

‘The lodges have electricity, but there are no other lights in the town and many of the ruins are unstable; we don’t want anyone getting lost or hurt. As an added incentive, anyone caught bunking in the wrong lodge, or with illicit substances on their person, can expect to sit out the formal next term.’

Mack tuned out. She was certain at least half of her classmates carried something stronger than water in their drink bottles, and not one of them would be discovered. Students tended to act out towards the end of Year Eleven, making the most of their relative freedom before knuckling down for Year Twelve. Parties got out of hand. Accidents happened. And the school had a reputation to uphold. Officially, Retreat was an opportunity to learn about the peninsula’s mining and maritime history, and a chance for students to exercise their independence and prepare for adult life with a mini share-house experience. But, actually, it was a risk management strategy. Two semi-supervised nights in the arse-end of nowhere with few questions asked and one guiding rule: whatever happens on Retreat, stays on Retreat.

‘. . . It’s likely still too cold for snakes,’ Mr Wallace continued with his list of cautions, ‘but they are active in the area, so keep your ankles covered and make plenty of noise when you’re moving around the town. You might also be lucky enough to meet emus, kangaroos, wallabies –’

‘Land sharks, bunyips, drop bears . . .’

Mack twisted to see Priya, who was sitting with her boyfriend Jase in the row behind.

‘I reckon they’re trying to thin our numbers,’ Priya whispered. ‘Baynton sounds like a deathtrap.’

‘Care to repeat that for the whole form, Ms De Sousa?’

Priya leaned into the aisle and flashed her straight-A smile. ‘I was just remarking on what an enriching experience this will be, Mr Wallace.’

Raffi glanced over her shoulder to grin at Priya, but her gaze landed on Mack. It was the first time they’d made eye contact in more than a week, and Mack’s stomach flipped. She forced a clumsy smile, hoping that Raffi might smile back. Share the joke. But her fingers twitched towards the small, silver cross at her throat – a nervous habit – and her curls tumbled over her shoulder as she turned away, shutting Mack out.

Though it took the better part of the day to reach the park, Mack felt the journey was over too soon. She’d never been to the Sturt Peninsula before and had assumed Chalky Flats National Park would be similar to those closer to home, with grassy picnic grounds, signed bushwalking trails and modern toilet blocks. Despite Mr Wallace’s warnings, she’d pictured Baynton as a kitschy tourist attraction: the lodges nestled together, surrounded by manicured paths and greenery, and the park’s visitor centre close by. She kept waiting for the wind-beaten mallee scrub to plump to a proper forest, and for the glimpses of waves seething against sheer cliffs to be replaced by sandy swimming coves.

It wasn’t until Ms Lim turned off the park’s main road onto a dirt drive that terminated by a wire gate and a faded wooden sign proclaiming Baynton that Mack realised she’d been imagining Retreat all wrong. There was no visitor centre. No kiosk selling lattes and icy poles. The closest town was little more than a smattering of fishing shacks fifteen minutes in the rear-view, and the nearest supermarket was back in Troubridge where they’d stopped for lunch.

‘This can’t be it . . .?’ Shelley said, sharing Mack’s bewilderment as they took in the view of crumbling, sun-bleached ruins protruding from the bush either side of a dusty track beyond the gate. ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere.’

But Mr Wallace was ordering everyone to disembark and gather in their lodge groups.

‘We’ll be okay,’ Mack assured her, with more confidence than she felt. ‘The restored buildings must be further in.’

By the time they made their way off the bus and collected their photocopied maps from Ms Lim, most of the other students had their bags from the luggage compartment and were figuring out where they needed to go. Priya spotted Mack and snuck Jase a goodbye kiss behind the teachers’ backs.

‘Have you checked the map?’ she asked, waving her copy as she skipped over to join them. ‘This place is HUGE and our lodge is right at the other end of the town.’ She put on a spooky voice and waggled her fingers. ‘The last house on the left.’

Mack frowned. ‘I’m guessing that’s a horror reference?’

Priya and Raffi had after-school jobs at their local Movieland, where they spent their night shifts screening bloody marathons on the store’s overhead TVs.

‘The Last House on the Left. Wes Craven. Nineteen seventy-two,’ Raffi said, lured from her nearby knot of theatre friends by the promise of movie talk. ‘Never cleared for release here. Our manager keeps a bootleg under the counter, but it’s not Craven’s best work. In fact, everything before A Nightmare on Elm Street . . .’

She paused to draw breath and gather her mental notes for an impromptu lecture on Wes Craven’s filmography, then trailed off as though suddenly aware who she was speaking to. ‘Doesn’t matter.’

Mack hated scary movies. They were predictable and degrading and she could never understand how a psycho in a mask slicing up teens with some ridiculously phallic weapon passed for entertainment, but whatever. An uncomfortable silence settled over them and she scrabbled to chase it off.

‘Guys, this is Shelley.’

‘Yeah, Kyle already handled the introductions.’ Priya fixed Shelley with an appraising look that wasn’t altogether kind. ‘I’m Priya. This is Raffi, and this –’ she held up a single key dangling from a Sturt Peninsula souvenir key chain ‘– is our key to a good time. Shall we?’ She gestured towards the track.

Raffi hesitated. ‘I’ll meet you at the lodge in a bit. I want to check out the lake first.’ She gave them a devious grin. ‘Maybe see if Smiling Jack’s around and keen to pay us a visit.’

‘Who?’ Shelley asked.

‘The Baynton ghost,’ Raffi explained. ‘People see him every year, and I’ve got a feeling he’s going to put on one hell of a show for us tonight.’

‘We’re going to conduct a seance to summon him,’ Priya added.

Mack glanced at Raffi. ‘We’re still doing that?’

She’d assumed the silver lining to Raffi avoiding her was that they wouldn’t be summoning dark forces they had no business meddling with.

‘Unless you’re chickening out.’ Priya made a clucking sound.

‘We need four to cast the circle,’ Raffi said, making it clear that Mack was only included for numbers’ sake. ‘You’ll join us, won’t you?’ she asked Shelley.

‘I don’t know.’ Shelley hugged herself as she surveyed the ruins. ‘Is it safe?’

Priya waved off her doubts. ‘Raffi’s the queen of dreaming up spooky shit. She’ll make it creepy, but it’s just a bit of fun. You don’t scare easily, do you?’

Shelley frowned at the question, still eyeing the ruins, and her reply was so quiet – so unexpected – Mack wondered if Shelley realised she’d spoken aloud when she said: ‘Probably not as easily as you.’

After Raffi left, fishing her notebook and pen from her backpack as she went, Mack consulted the map Ms Lim had given her. The town’s main buildings ran in two crooked rows, stretching along the lake’s edge, with the restored lodges dotted among the ruins. The former streets had been converted into a historic walk that looped around the buildings, while two larger houses, built for the mining company’s executives and their families, sat atop a small rise.

‘Overseer’s Lodge is here,’ Priya said, tapping the furthest building from the Gatehouse. ‘It’s the most isolated, but Ms Lim and Mr Wallace feel that, as the school captain elect for next year, I’m mature and responsible enough to be trusted staying there with my sensible friends.’

Mack snorted. For all Priya’s glowing report cards and the squeaky-clean image she projected at school, she wasn’t above breaking the rules. She was just smart enough not to get caught.

‘The other girls are in Miner’s and Stable Keeper’s lodges closer to the lake,’ Priya continued. ‘And the boys are up in the big houses on the hill.’

It seemed straightforward enough. But looking out at the town itself, Mack struggled to get her bearings. From the bus, she’d caught glimpses of Baynton Lake as they passed it on the park’s main road – a vast anomaly of crystalline blue winking through the bush. But here by the shore, shrubs and stunted trees grew thickly around the buildings, screening the water from view. If she hadn’t already seen it with her own eyes, she wouldn’t believe it was there.

While they’d been orienting themselves, the rest of their classmates had disappeared around the first bend in the track. Mack knew they couldn’t have been more than a few hundred metres ahead, but a steady wind blew in off the nearby sea, mixing brine into the dust and cutting off their voices, and it seemed that they’d been swallowed by the bush. She shuddered at the thought and tried to ignore the sharp-eyed crows watching from the trees.

‘You need to apologise,’ Priya said after they’d been walking for a minute.

Mack glanced around confused and saw that Shelley, distracted by the scenery, had fallen a few steps behind. It had been cool when they left the city, but now the sun was strong, beating against the town’s limestone buildings and chalky paths, so that the landscape appeared flattened and over exposed.

Mack squinted at Priya through her sunglasses. ‘What do you mean?’

‘To Raffi,’ Priya clarified. ‘I don’t know what’s going on with you two. She won’t tell me. But I’m not about to spend two nights with the pair of you not speaking.’

‘What makes you think it’s my fault?’ Mack asked, wary.

Priya raised an eyebrow. ‘You couldn’t ignore Raffi for a day if you tried. Whatever boneheaded thing you did or said, she will get over it. Apologise.’

Mack bit her lip. ‘It’s not that simple.’

She’d gone over it a thousand times in her head. Priya was right: she’d deep-ended Raffi in an awful situation and Raffi had every right to be angry. Or hurt. Or whatever it was she was feeling. But while Mack wished she had taken an extra half-second to think things through, she wasn’t sorry.

‘Sy told me she bailed on the cast party last weekend,’ Priya said. ‘And I know you stayed behind to congratulate her after the show. Did something happen between you two?’ And then, seeing the expression on Mack’s face, she reached out to touch her arm and gentled her tone. ‘Please tell me you didn’t do what I think you did, Mack.’

Mack pressed her lips together and said nothing. She didn’t have to. Priya knew that Mack had been half in love with Raffi from the moment they met, and all the way there soon after. Priya had also told Mack, on more than one occasion, to give her heart a stern talking to and move on. Raffi liked boys; it was pointless wishing she felt otherwise. But lately something had seemed to shift between them.

Yes, lots of best friends walked arm in arm to class and gave each other piggyback rides and shoulder rubs. But when Raffi twisted Mack’s hair into intricate braids at lunchtime and reached beneath their desks in History to trace messages on her knee with her fingertip, Mack wanted to believe it meant something more. That Raffi just needed time. And when Raffi asked her to stick around after curtain at the Year Eleven production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Mack hoped that time had come.

It was Shakespeare’s fault. Filling her head with fancy words and romantic ideas. If Mr Masters, their Drama teacher, had picked a sombre Brecht or cheery panto, Mack would have kept her head and things would probably, maybe, have been fine. But he’d gone with the Bard and typecast Raffi, with her waist-length curls and dancer’s grace, as Titania, the fairy queen. And for two spelled hours, Mack had watched her person shimmer and sparkle under rosy lights.

She had remained in her seat while the rest of the audience filed out after the curtain call, and once she was alone, Raffi had stepped from the wings twirling Puck’s magic flower.

‘Join me in fairyland?’ Raffi asked, swinging herself up into the flower-laden hammock that served as Titania’s bower.

Mack flicked her eyes towards the foyer. ‘Mr Masters will kill us if he catches us mucking around on set.’

‘Be bold.’ Raffi’s eyes glittered under the house lights. ‘Mr Masters need not know.’

She was still half in character – vibrant and glowing – with the play’s magic sparking all around, and Mack felt a small, illicit thrill as she crossed the fourth wall to place a tentative foot on the painted forest floor. With the theatre to themselves, it felt like slipping into a private world: an enchanted wood suspended in the black. Plastic flowers crinkled under her hands as she pulled herself into the hammock and the air was hazy and sweet with the lingering waft of hairspray and dry ice.

Raffi scootched closer and nodded up at the empty stalls. ‘You think they liked it?’

‘Are you kidding?’ Mack asked. ‘It might be one of the best high school productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the greater Adelaide area this year. And if not in the top five, then top ten for sure.’

‘Bitch.’

Mack nudged her shoulder. ‘You were incredible, Raf.’

Raffi’s smile was radiant as she presented the enchanted flower to Mack. ‘For your kindness, fair lady.’

She closed her eyes and Mack tickled them with the flower’s petals, the way Puck did to work the love spell in the play. When Raffi opened them again, her gaze landed on one of the set’s plywood trees and her expression turned soft and gooey.

‘Oh, tree!’ she cried. ‘How smooth and sturdy thy trunk! How velvet thy leaves! That I might curl in thy hollows and cool the flush from mine cheeks in thy dappled shade!’

Mack snorted.

Raffi turned back to her, eyes flashing with feigned hurt. ‘You mock me, madam?’

‘I would never –’

But Raffi had already plucked the flower from Mack’s hand to brush the bloom across her eyes. ‘See how you like the fairy’s trick.’

Mack knew she was supposed to follow Raffi’s lead. Pick some absurd object as the first thing she looked upon with her love-spelled eyes and fawn over it the way Titania did for Nick Bottom and his donkey ears. She had every intention of doing just that. But the petals, silky and soft, seemed to whisper an invitation against her skin and when she opened her eyes, the mood had shifted.

Her gaze fell on Raffi. Resplendent in her gossamer fairy gown, she glittered and gleamed, while everything else blurred to shadow. Just for a moment, Mack forgot herself. Forgot that Raffi had a boyfriend. And that the overwhelming probability and soul-crushing heartache of being rejected were absolutely, under no circumstances worth the moon-shot chance that Raffi returned her feelings. Safe in the play’s spell, Mack leaned towards her, cupped Raffi’s cheek in her hand and kissed her.

Raffi’s lips were warm and sugary with the energy drinks the cast survived on in production week, and her pulse stumbled beneath Mack’s fingertips. Mack shifted closer. Plastic vines and leaves tickled her legs, stars sparked in her chest and glitter fizzed in her veins. It felt like a beginning. Or a happily ever after.

But when she drew back to take a breath, she found Raffi staring at her, holding very still.

‘What are you doing?’ Her voice was a barely-there whisper, but it broke the spell.

Mack’s head spun with a rush of vertigo. The stars were gone and dark spots blotted her vision. She’d read it wrong. Crossed a line. Made a terrible mistake.

‘I thought – I thought you wanted me to.’

‘I’m with Sy.’

The person Raffi loved and had been dating for six months, and whom Mack liked to pretend did not exist.

Raffi continued to look at her with a panicky mix of alarm and confusion. ‘You’re my best friend, Mack.’

Subtext: You are not my girlfriend. You are not allowed to kiss me.

‘Right. Yes.’ Mack’s skin was on fire, the words thick in her throat.

Raffi shook her head as though she couldn’t understand what had possessed Mack.

‘I have to go.’ Raffi scrambled down from the bower and backed towards the wings. ‘Sy’s waiting for me, and my parents are here.’

Mack felt selfish and guilty as the world crashed back in. This was Raffi’s night. There was a foyer full of people waiting to congratulate her. A cast party at Sy’s house. Mack had no right to pull focus from that.

‘I’m sorry, Raf.’

Raffi stopped in the wings by the stage manager’s desk, her expression uncertain.

‘Did you mean it?’ Her voice was small and hopeful, offering Mack a way out.

All Mack had to do was laugh it off, blame the weird theatre energy, or Puck’s mischief. She’d helped Raffi learn her lines; she knew the magic words:

‘If we shadows have offended,

Think but this and all is mended . . .’

But they weren’t dreaming or spelled. She had been in love with Raffi almost as long as they’d been friends, and now that she’d admitted as much, her heart wasn’t up to pretending otherwise.

‘I’ve always meant it.’

Mack felt their friendship shift as she said it. Raffi had suddenly seemed very far away, cut adrift in the backstage dark. There was something Raffi wanted to say. Her lips moved, trying to make the words, but they were wedged too deep within. And then the stage manager – who was also their Chemistry teacher – came bustling out to set the ghost light and shooed Raffi back to the dressing-rooms and Mack to the foyer.

They hadn’t spoken since.

‘Jeezus, Whitmore. She has a boyfriend.’

Mack blinked back to the present. Dust. Insects. Priya staring at her in dismay.

‘Painfully aware, but thanks for the reminder.’

Mack glanced back at Shelley to see how much she’d taken in, hating that there was a witness to this conversation. But Shelley had wandered off the track to investigate one of the ruins: a small house with its roof and windows still intact.

Priya squeezed Mack’s arm again, with more affection this time. ‘You had to know how that would go, Mack. Even still, it must be a hell of a hurt to carry.’

‘Mack! Priya! You need to see this,’ Shelley called from the far side of the house.

Priya grimaced. ‘Is it decomposing?’

‘No, it’s fine. Come look.’

Priya raised an eyebrow at Mack: Do we dare? And Mack led the way, treading gingerly through the scrub and scanning the ground for snakes.

‘Here, through the window,’ Shelley said, stepping back to make room as they joined her.

Mack leaned forward and cupped her hands against the glass. Beyond the mothy remains of a lace curtain, she made out a kitchen sink with rusted tin mugs on the drying board, a wooden table with two chairs and the ashy remains of a fire in the hearth – all of it hazy beneath decades of dust.

‘The miners left everything.’ Shelley’s voice was hushed with wonder. ‘It’s all been sitting out here for seventy years.’

‘Let me see.’ Priya nudged Mack aside.

A sudden gust of wind shivered the trees and Mack hugged herself tight. ‘This place gives me the creeps. I hate the idea of sleeping in dead people’s houses.’

‘Dude, your actual house is heritage listed,’ Priya reminded her, stepping away from the window. ‘Someone has one hundred per cent croaked there. Probably lots of people. Most of them in your room.’

‘You’re evil, you know that, right?’

‘Relax. The miners didn’t die here; they moved away,’ Priya said. ‘They left their stuff because back then the road out was a dirt track and most of them would have been on horseback or sharing carts between families. There might be a few graves in the bush, but the town wasn’t large or established enough to need a cemetery.’ Priya spun in a circle, her arms stretched wide to the ruins. ‘These are some of Australia’s least haunted houses. And speaking of houses, I would very much like to find ours.’

With their backpacks and duffels weighing them down, it was a further ten-minute walk to Overseer’s Lodge, and everything they’d seen of the town so far had made Mack wary of what to expect. But unlike the ruins they’d encountered along the road, Overseer’s Lodge appeared sturdy and well kept.

It sat in a neat clearing reached by a short path off the main track. Its limestone walls had been re-mortared and the gutters and trimmings painted a glossy burgundy to match the new tin roof. Polished window glass winked beneath a wide verandah. The front steps were freshly swept and twin pots of red-flowering grevillea flanked the door. Best of all, the surrounding bush was thick enough to obscure all evidence of the eerie town. Mack almost allowed herself to relax, but as they crossed the clearing, there came a sound like someone crying.

She stopped. ‘Did you both hear that?’

Priya shrugged. ‘It’s probably a bird.’

The sound came again, clearer this time. A high whine from the far side of the house where the main track looped down towards the lake.

‘It sounds like a little kid.’

‘All the way out here?’ Priya asked.

Mack knew it seemed unlikely, but she was sure what she’d heard. ‘Mr Wallace said the town’s open to the public, right? Maybe they came with their parents and got lost somehow?’

Priya and Shelley exchanged doubtful looks.

Mack shook her head and dropped her bags. While she wasn’t exactly keen to go investigating strange noises in the bush, she wasn’t about to ignore a cry for help. ‘Watch my stuff. I’m going to check it out.’

Mack jogged back to the main track following the sound, which seemed to be coming from a stand of bushes to the left of the path where a second track speared into the scrub. As she drew near, she saw that the track was blocked by a gate, similar to the one they’d come through at the other end of the town and affixed with a faded sign:

FIRE TRACK!

PARK AND EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY.

KEEP GATE CLOSED.

Except this gate was open.

The sound she’d heard was the whine of its hinges as it moved in the breeze. Her heart stumbled with relief and she checked the map. The fire track ran behind their lodge, following the old single-track railway the miners had used to transport the quarried gypsum to Port Rawson, and cutting an alternate route back to the park’s main road. There was also a yellow plastic trail marker nailed to the gatepost, and Mack figured the track must be used by hikers exploring the park on foot. Careless hikers who ignored signs about keeping gates closed. Sure enough, she spotted a dark-clad figure a hundred metres or so up the track, heading away from the town. Their features were blurry and distorted by the heat shimmer, but from their size and gait, she guessed it was a man.

‘Oi!’ she yelled, before she could stop herself. ‘You left the gate open!’

The figure stopped and turned. Definitely a man. A large man. The sun glanced off the gypsum and the track appeared liquid with the man seeming to hover a breath above the ground. Mack knew it was a mirage – something to do with the angle at which the light hit the earth – but the effect was eerie. And there was something wrong with the man’s eyes. They were too large and too dark against his pale skin.

Shit.

Mack wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Kyle Lynton she could handle. But this man was a stranger. He could hurt her.

‘Never mind!’ she called, the gate wailing again as she pulled it closed and secured the latch. ‘I’ve got it!’

The man tilted his head to the side, as though trying to make out what she was saying, then gave her a wide, easy grin and lifted his hand in a wave.

Mack, uncertain, half-raised her hand in return. The gesture seemed friendly – the man’s way of thanking her for closing the gate – but something about the way he was looking at her made her skin crawl.

‘MACK! MACK!’ Priya called from somewhere behind her.

‘Coming!’ she replied, and, turning, almost crashed into Shelley.

Mack hadn’t heard her approach.

She was standing very still, her gaze intent on the man.

‘Jesus, you scared me.’ Mack touched her shoulder. ‘You okay? How long have you been standing there?’

Shelley blinked at her. ‘He’s in the trees.’

Her voice was low and flat, and Mack thought she must have misheard.

‘Pardon?’

Shelley stared over Mack’s shoulder. ‘He’s in the trees.’

Mack had a sudden vision of the man on the track forcing her up against the trunk of a sturdy pine, though none grew in the area. She felt his greasy hair against her cheek and his breath was hot and sour in her ear. Dread pierced her chest and she whirled back towards the fire track in a panic. But the smiling man was gone.

PRIYA

Priya knew the wild stories about Baynton, passed down by students in the years above. They claimed the lodges were so far apart and the bush so thick between, that you could throw a party and no one would know. And that the teachers talked a big game about checking on students at all hours of the night, but in fact never visited the lodges after nine pm because the school deemed it inappropriate. In Baynton, they said, you could get away with anything, so long as there was no evidence left by morning and you were willing to brave a run-in with Smiling Jack. But, to Priya, the idea that they’d be truly unsupervised had seemed about as likely as a genuine haunting.

Now, seeing Baynton for herself, she realised with a sinking heart that, if anything, the stories undersold it. Bringing students here was a clear liability, and she bet the school got the lodges dirt cheap. That’d be typical. Hell, the teachers probably made up Smiling Jack in a desperate attempt to scare students into staying indoors and out of trouble.

Priya knew she should be pleased. After more than a year of hooking up in the cramped back seat of Jase’s Lancer, friends’ bedrooms at parties and once in the sports equipment shed at school, she and Jase would finally, finally be able to spend a whole, unhurried night together. They’d been looking forward to it all term, but as much as Priya enjoyed being alone with Jase, if she was deep-down honest with herself, she’d been more excited about the promise of spending two nights with her friends. It’d been ages since they’d hung out, just the three of them. And though Priya was the one who chose to fill her weekends with parties, Jase’s footy matches and the hours and hours it took to get ready for these things, sometimes what she really wanted was to put on her ugly-but-comfy pyjamas, swap her contacts for the glasses she wore at home, eat junk food and watch B-grade movies with her friends.

Being around Mack and Raffi was easy. Unlike Jase’s friends, they never gave her shit for being on the state debating team and taking Stage 2 Physics and Chem a year early – they were proud of her. They didn’t judge her long-time crush on David Duchovny or the fact that she was an active member of several X Files online fan forums. Or at least they didn’t judge her much. And they didn’t think it was rude or antisocial that she sometimes threaded her headphones through her sleeves to listen to books on tape at Jase’s footy games, because they agreed that keeping up with the game took minimal brain power and there was no good reason to waste whole afternoons of potential learning when she was perfectly capable of multitasking.

But now they’d been lumped with the awkward new girl, Mack and Raffi weren’t speaking and the teachers seemed content to let them take their chances in the bush, so Priya would have to go with Plan B.

She thought of the new pink bra with lace trim and matching knickers hidden with the sandwich bag of three pre-rolled joints inside a hoodie at the bottom of her duffel bag and checked her watch. Four o’clock. She needed to shower, shave her legs, straighten her hair, decide on an outfit from the several she’d packed and do her make-up. Sighing, she looked down at the bags Mack and Shelley had dropped when they went to investigate the definitely-nothing-to-worry-about noise.

‘Guess I’m playing porter,’ she said, scooping them up with her own and carrying them to the verandah.

She set everything down beneath the window and felt in her pocket for the key. But as she went to fit it in the lock, the door creaked inward, opened by a sudden breath of wind. Or someone waiting on the other side. Priya frowned at the thought and pushed the door wide.

‘Hello?’

Cool, stale air wafted from inside.

‘Someone here?’

Insects teemed in the surrounding bush, and wind harassed the trees, but the house was quiet and still. Whoever had been there last must have forgotten to lock up. Not that there was any need way out here. But even still. Priya inspected the door more closely. The handle and lock were old and loose, and the strike plate had rusted free of its screws. That was the problem; the door couldn’t shut without it. It had fallen into one of the flowerpots, and the screws were long gone.

‘Perfect,’ she muttered, pulling her T-shirt over her nose to ward off the musty smell as she made her way inside.

The front door opened into a dim living room with cheap, industrial carpet and a gas heater retrofitted in an old fireplace on the opposite wall. There was a blind drawn across the single window and a pair of tartan sofas faced one another across a scuffed coffee table. The carpet and sofas were murky with stains: wine, tea and mucky shoes. If it was anything else, Priya didn’t want to know. A folder on the coffee table offered park maps, information on local flora and fauna and instructions for how to operate the heater. It wasn’t much of a welcome.

She got the window open to air the place out and made her way into the narrow hall that led to the remaining rooms: two single bedrooms on the left side and a larger twin share on the right. They all featured the same dingy, grey carpet and wood-framed beds with bare mattresses. The twin share also housed a heavy wardrobe with a cloudy oval mirror that was so old it might have been left by the original occupants.

At the far end of the hall, the kitchen and added-on bathroom were separated by a concrete-floored mudroom cluttered with cleaning supplies. Through the back-door window, Priya saw log benches squared around a fire pit at the centre of a small clearing and thick mallee scrub beyond. The bathroom was spider city, with daddy-long-legs creeping beneath the mildewed shower curtain, and a draught whispered through rust spots in the corrugated tin walls. A laminated sign by the mirror informed guests that the house used rainwater, and showers should be kept to a maximum of five minutes. Priya scrunched her nose at it and tried the light. The bare bulb threw odd shadows and there was no space to balance a make-up bag on or around the sink.

‘Every girl’s dream.’

She poked her head into the kitchen, expecting more creepy-crawlies, and stopped when she saw what was sitting on the kitchen table.

‘Holy. Shit.’

And then she was tearing back through the house and onto the verandah, calling Mack’s name. The bush seemed to swallow the sound and she tried again, cupping her hands around her mouth like a megaphone.

‘MACK! MACK!’

A moment later, she spotted Mack and Shelley making their way back towards the lodge from the main track. Mack had her arms crossed and was walking quickly, while Shelley trailed a little way behind with her neck cranked at an uncomfortable angle and her gaze fixed on something over her shoulder. It was . . . odd. Shelley was odd.

Right as Priya thought this, Shelley’s head snapped around and her eyes locked on Priya’s. Her expression was cold and blank, making Priya flinch.

‘What’s wrong?’ Mack asked.

Priya blinked. Shelley was herself again, looking at her with the same concern as Mack, and Priya wondered if she’d imagined it.

‘There’s – there’s something in the house. Leave the bags.’

She led them through the living room and down the hall to the kitchen.

‘What is it?’ Mack whispered, close on her heels.

Priya smiled to hear the fear in her voice and, feeling in control once more, raised a trembling arm towards her discovery. ‘Spirits!’

A full bottle of vodka sat in the middle of the kitchen table, spot-lit by the late afternoon sun coming in the window.

‘This was here when you came in?’ Mack sounded wary, as though she suspected a trick.

Priya assumed it had been left by the previous guests, but now she thought about it, that didn’t make sense. A ranger would have been in to clean since then. Surely they would have taken it. Especially with a school group coming through.

‘The front door’s busted. It must be a gift from Jase or –’ Sy. It was probably Sy. Raffi would have told him about the seance and this was his way of wishing them a good night. He was thoughtful like that. And partial to bold gestures. But Mack could do without the reminder. ‘– a secret admirer,’ Priya finished, wondering whether Sy or anyone else would have had time to deliver the bottle before she and the others arrived. She figured it was doable, though it would have been tight.

‘You can’t drink that,’ Shelley said from behind Mack.

Priya turned to look at her. Up close, she was sweaty and flushed from the walk, with damp patches showing in the armpits of her T-shirt and her fringe flattened against her forehead. Priya wondered if she knew to blow dry it with a round brush to give it volume, or whether anyone had told her that skate shoes were fine with cargos but running shoes, like the ones she was wearing, were a hard no. As was having to borrow a near-stranger’s jumper to tie around your waist after being caught out by your period. Maybe Shelley didn’t care. Or maybe she was one of those super-churchy types that took a pledge against having fun. Either way, Priya got the impression that Shelley hadn’t been invited to many parties where there’d been underage drinking.

She didn’t understand girls like Shelley. Resented them even. Priya’s parents had moved here from India when her mum was pregnant with her so that she could enjoy all the privileges of Australian life. Her mum never let her forget that they had left their home for her, and it was Priya’s job to respect that sacrifice and make the most of what she’d been given. To fit in. Be grateful.

‘You’re not going to nark on us are you, new girl?’

Shelley bit her lip. ‘It could be poison.’

Priya swallowed a snort. ‘Why would someone leave a booby-trapped bottle of vodka way out here? Plus, it’s sealed.’

‘We should at least figure out who it’s from,’ Mack said.

Priya had never known her to be prim about drinking, but she seemed rattled. Spooked, even.

‘If you don’t want in, I’ll take it with me to Jase’s tonight.’

‘You’re leaving?’ Mack asked, a note of betrayal in her voice. ‘I thought we were going to hang out?’

Priya felt a stab of guilt. She wouldn’t want to spend the night with Shelley and the person who’d just crushed her heart either. A better friend would stay. But she’d promised Jase and he’d be pissed if she bailed. Besides, Mack was the one who’d volunteered to be Shelley’s buddy. And it was her choice to tell Raffi how she felt, knowing they were coming out here together. She’d made her bed. She’d have to lie in it.

‘It won’t be till later,’ she said, by way of compromise. ‘I wouldn’t want to miss the seance. Did you see there’s a fire pit out back? We’ll make it really witchy.’

Mack didn’t seem to hear her. ‘You can’t walk to Jase’s lodge by yourself in the dark, Priya. It isn’t safe.’

Priya wasn’t psyched at the thought of finding her way up the hill in the dead of night either, but it wasn’t that far. And she couldn’t ask Jase to come to her. All the boys had invited their girlfriends. It was going to be a party. She didn’t want to pull him away from that or be the nagging, needy girlfriend who was scared to have any fun.

‘I’ll take a torch and stick to the path. It’ll be fine.’

Mack remained unconvinced. She moved to the table to examine the bottle, turning it over in her hands with a pinched expression. ‘Seems a pretty extravagant gesture for someone in our year. How would they even get their hands on this? And why wouldn’t they leave a note?’

‘Maybe it was the ghost,’ Priya teased, but Mack was starting to weird her out. ‘Give it here. Let me see.’ She grabbed the bottle, unscrewed the cap and took a swig, grimacing at the taste. ‘There! Come tonight, I’ll be dead – poisoned by persons unknown – or we’ll have ourselves a party.’

‘Knock, knock!’ Ms Lim’s voice carried down the hall. ‘Anyone home?’

All three girls exchanged a panicked look.

Priya shoved the bottle in the nearest cupboard and fumbled for the packet of peppermint Lifesavers in her pocket.

‘Girls?’

‘In the kitchen!’ Mack called, sliding into a chair and kicking out another for Shelley to do the same.

‘Hey, here you are.’ Ms Lim poked her head around the door. ‘Scorching day for September,’ she said, fanning herself with her hat. ‘Could I have a glass of water while you’re up, Priya?’

‘Sure. You okay, Ms Lim?’

Their teacher was wearing a plain T-shirt and khakis rather than the bright-patterned dresses she favoured at school and she seemed frazzled, her fingers twitching around a phantom cigarette.

Ms Lim waved her off. ‘Rocky start is all. The girls in Stable Keeper’s Lodge found a dead mouse in one of the beds.’

‘Gross.’ Priya wrinkled her nose as she opened cupboards looking for a glass.

‘You’re settling in all right, though? Making Shelley feel welcome?’

‘Absolutely,’ Priya said, before Shelley could get a word in. ‘We’re going to make nachos and play truth or dare. Maybe even invite Smiling Jack to join us.’

‘Don’t do that,’ Ms Lim said, her voice turning sharp. ‘Don’t say his name.’

Priya rolled her eyes. ‘Come on, Ms Lim. You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?’

‘No. Of course not. But this place . . .’ Ms Lim’s voice trailed off and she hugged herself, rubbing her arms for warmth despite the heat. ‘Look, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I’m an old scholar. Class of ninety-four. I came on Retreat as a student, and I stayed here in Overseer’s. My friends and I thought the ghost was just a silly story, too. And maybe it is. But this story gets to people. It messes with your head.’ She seemed to remember herself and switched back into teacher mode. ‘And I’d rather not be woken up at three am because you’ve worked yourselves into a panic.’

Priya shot Mack a disbelieving look behind Ms Lim’s back: Smiling Jack was definitely a scare tactic. But Mack was one hundred per cent invested.

‘Did you see him?’ Mack whispered.

Ms Lim hesitated. ‘I – no. No, I didn’t.’

But it was clear from her tone that yes, she did. She absolutely did. Or at least, that’s what she wanted them to think.

‘You can tell us,’ Priya said, playing along as she handed Ms Lim her water. ‘We won’t repeat it.’

‘No. It’s not appropriate.’

‘If something here means us harm, we have a right to know,’ Shelley said, her tone so serious that all three of them stopped to look at her.

Ms Lim waivered, uncertain. ‘All right,’ she said after a moment and motioned for them to lean in, as though worried someone might be eavesdropping. ‘But I’m only sharing this so you won’t go messing with things you don’t understand.’ She set down her water glass and took a deep breath. ‘To be clear, I don’t know how much I can trust my memory. It was a long time ago. My friends and I were all a bit on edge being in an unfamiliar place so far from home, and we’d been winding each other up telling spooky stories. What I experienced could have been a night terror. Or just my imagination. But it felt real. And whatever it was made me more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life.’

Priya rubbed the back of her neck, massaging the niggling unease from the base of her skull as Ms Lim continued.

‘It gets deep dark out here and we’d left the hall and mudroom lights on so we could find our way around. I was in the single bedroom at the front of the house and woke around two, needing to use the bathroom. The lights were on when I went into the hall, same as they’d been when we went to bed, and the other bedroom doors were closed. I remember thinking how quiet the house was while I was in the bathroom – so quiet I could hear the fridge in the kitchen and nothing else. It was eerie. If one of my friends had come out of their room, I would have picked up on it. They all swore the next day that they’d been asleep at the time, and I didn’t catch a single footstep. But when I opened the bathroom door, all the lights had been switched off.’

‘Had the power gone out?’ Priya asked, certain there was an easy explanation.

Ms Lim shook her head. ‘The bathroom light was still working. I left it on to find my way back to bed. Everything was sort of shadowy, but as I walked through the mudroom towards the hall, I saw a tall figure standing here in the kitchen. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but its presence felt menacing. I was sure that whatever I was looking at was evil. Pure evil. And, while I couldn’t see its face – if it even had a face – I knew that it was watching me, and it was smiling.’

Priya resisted the urge to laugh, but Mack looked spooked. ‘What did you do? Did you turn on the light?’

‘No. God no.’ Ms Lim shook her head, embarrassed by her younger self. ‘I ran back down the hall.’

‘Did it hurt you?’ Shelley asked, speaking up.

‘Not exactly – and this bit I may have imagined – because while I didn’t hear a sound and I didn’t look back, right before I reached my room, I felt a cold hand brush through my hair.’

‘Creepy,’ Priya said, without conviction; it was obvious one of Ms Lim’s friends had tricked her. But Mack and Shelley seemed freaked, their eyes scanning the windows like they expected to see the ghost grinning at them from the other side.

‘Is it – are we safe out here?’ Mack asked.

Ms Lim looked mortified. She’d been speaking to them as though she were sixteen again – one of their classmates – and had ventured deep into overshare territory. ‘Oh – yes. It’s safe,’ she assured them, waving off her story. ‘It was a bad dream – I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘Besides,’ Priya said, ‘if Smiling Jack does show up, Raffi will know how to exorcise him, or whatever it is you do with ghosts.’

‘She can do that?’ Shelley asked, her tone genuine.

‘Oh sure,’ Priya replied. ‘Raffi’s a witch.’

Raffi could have fun with that.

Ms Lim frowned. ‘Where is Raphaella?’

‘Journaling at the lake,’ Mack said.

‘Alone?’ Ms Lim pursed her lips. ‘Look, I don’t want to scare you more than I already have – you’re safe in the lodge, but Mr Wallace was right about the town: it’s dangerous. There are wild animals out there, and all sorts of things that could hurt you. It’s a bad idea to go out on your own. Especially at night.’ She fixed them with a no-bullshit look sharp enough to pierce even Priya’s scepticism. ‘Ghost or no ghost, you girls need to stick together.’

RAFFI

Raffi squinted at the rippling surface of the lake and wondered how much longer she could avoid going up to the lodge. She wasn’t usually one to shy away from things that scared her. As a kid, her favourite part of the day had been after bedtime prayers and stories when her mum or dad turned out the light and all that was solid and certain blinked away, and anything seemed possible.

Ghosts, demons, vampires, werewolves, zombies, masked psychopaths wielding knives and chainsaws – she could handle them all. Couldn’t get enough, in fact. By the end of primary school, she’d read her way through the Goosebumps, Fear Street and Point Horror books and graduated to Stephen King, Clive Barker and Thomas Harris. More recently, she’d been reading Shirley Jackson, Flannery O’Connor, Daphne du Maurier, M. R. James, Poe, Stoker, Stevenson, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Brontë sisters, tracing horror all the way back through its Gothic forebears to Frankenstein. It thrilled her to know that when you peeled back the bloody curtain on almost two hundred years of terror, you found a teenage girl looking out at a lake on a dark and stormy night, asking: ‘What if . . .?’

Raffi was good at asking ‘What if . . .?’. What if . . . there was a mutant dingo the size of a bear crouched in the trees preparing to rip her limb from limb? What if . . . the lake emitted a toxic gas and she only had moments to live? What if . . . every time she tried to stand, her legs gave way, so instead she let her feet sink down into the gypsum and anchor her there with fleshy roots while her body grew thick and tall and her hair twisted to become leaves in the wind? Because mutant dingoes, poison water and metamorphosis she could handle, but the thought of being alone with her best friend filled her with an icy dread.

It’d been a shock when Mack kissed her. A rogue firework flaring too bright between them that left Raffi seeing stars. But these things happened between friends. In the heat of the moment. Of course they did. Raffi had even imagined it. You couldn’t be that close to someone and not, could you? Couldn’t hug someone hello and goodbye five days a week, walk arm in arm to class and sleep pressed nose to nape in a single bed at sleepovers without at least wondering how it might feel – another What if . . .? to ponder in the dark. It didn’t need to mean anything. Not if they didn’t want it to.

But Mack liked her. Had always liked her. That was the silver bullet. The stake to her heart. Because if Raffi was honest with herself, she’d known. Not consciously, perhaps. But deep in the well of unspoken things. Mack had told her a thousand times, in a thousand ways. In the extra half-seconds of their hugs, the late-night phone calls about nothing much, her willingness to watch scary movies even though she hated violence and gore and still slept with a night-light. The fact that Raffi knew about the night-light.

She should have set clear boundaries. Taken care not to lead Mack on. Instead, she’d pressed herself closer, working the bond between them so thick with friendship bracelets, shared jokes and mix CDs, that she might overlook what else was in the weave. Now, Mack had unravelled all the threads with a single kiss, and Raffi was sorry. So very, very sorry. She knew she’d hurt Mack, and that she was deepening the wound with each new day they passed without speaking. But she needed time to make sense of her feelings, and what it meant that she had very much wanted to kiss Mack in return.

So far, she’d only succeeded in pushing away the people she cared about.

Sy wasn’t speaking to her.

And she couldn’t confide in Priya. It wouldn’t be fair.

As for her parents, well, they’d had a lot to say. Namely, that this was a phase. More deviant, attention-seeking behaviour. Like the ouija board and tarot deck they’d found under her bed. They couldn’t understand her attraction to these things – to this quote-unquote ‘alternative lifestyle’. What was wrong with her? Why did she always have to be different? And difficult? Sy was a lovely boy. And Raffi liked him, didn’t she? So why ruin that? Was she trying to upset them? Mack was a corrupting influence, that was certain. But really, they supposed it was their fault for allowing her to accept a performing arts scholarship to St Augustine’s, with its liberal agenda and lax approach to religious education. This never would have happened if they’d sent her to a Catholic school with her sisters and cousins. Lord save them, she was not to breathe a word about this to her cousins.

Raffi wondered if it’d been a mistake to tell her parents. It’d taken her an hour’s rehearsal in front of the mirror to settle on the words: I like boys, but also, maybe, girls. One girl, in particular. And I’ve liked her for a while. She’d known they’d take it badly. But after ignoring this part of herself for so long, coming out to them was her way of committing – to herself, to what she felt, and to Mack. Assuming Raffi found the nerve to face her, and assuming Mack would hear her out.

The look she’d given Raffi on the bus didn’t bode well. It was the same expression she’d worn when Raffi told her she was going out with Sy. A look that said: Yes, I may be smiling, but you should know that you have ripped out my heart and stamped it into a thousand bloody pieces. Raffi wasn’t ready to face whatever that look meant for their future. The possibility that she had lost Mack for good was too awful. Terrifying. Instead, just for an hour or two, she would focus on an easier ‘What if . . .?’ She would create a ghost.

The original story she’d scripted for the seance wasn’t going to work. None of the Smiling Jack ‘sightings’ over the years hinted at his origin story, but she’d imagined him being a drowned miner. Killed by his best friend who’d been having an affair with his wife, and his death made to look like an accident. In her version of the legend, he would walk from the lake at night to seek out his betrayers: a dripping, skeletal form, still clutching his pickaxe and peering in at the town’s windows. You’d know he was near by the slow drip, drip, drip of water from his clothes. She’d planned to use a water bottle to create the effect during the seance, and to leave little puddles in the bedrooms. Clichéd, perhaps, but effective.

The problem was the lake. It was bisected by a rocky causeway, though Raffi suspected that in summer when the water dropped, you could wade clear across it. The water, which she’d imagined a muddy khaki, was, in reality, a shocking, crystalline blue, and so clear that the bare, rocky bed remained visible even at its deepest point. There were no bones. No fish or reeds. And no strange shadows in the non-existent murk. In fact, when Raffi dipped her hand beneath the surface and held it up to the sun to dry, her skin glittered with thousands of tiny salt crystals. It was beautiful. Eerily beautiful. But a hard sell for a campfire ghost story.

She hovered her pen over a blank page in her notebook and closed her eyes. Breathed chalky dust, baked earth and brine. The soft undernote of decay. She asked the wind for stories, and listened to its urgent, whispered accounts of ships wrecked on nearby reefs and desperate souls who drove from inland towns to abandon their cars and their lives on the cliffs. The park was a transient place, it told her. Dotted with campsites. A destination for surfers, hikers, marine biologists, historians, sun-seeking families and school camps. People came from all over. Anyone might be passing through.

What if . . .?

What if . . .?

What if . . .?

She made the question an incantation, focused her imagination and, keeping her eyes closed, felt the town still around her. The lake’s ripples froze in place. Leaves remained lifted in the wind and a crow hung on the air, its black wings stretched wide. Energy thrummed beneath the hush: a low insect buzz building to roaring static. Raffi felt giddy and a little sick as her pen began to move and a blurred figure appeared in her mind’s eye on the far side of the lake. Watching. Waiting.

Come closer.

The vision obeyed, gliding towards her across the causeway and gaining definition as it approached. A man. Dressed in dark clothes. He stank of old sweat, hot earth and malice. Her skin goosebumped as she rose to meet him. He was pale as gypsum. Winking in and out in the glare. She reached out to hold him in place and twisted her fingers in his shadowy hair, drawing it down to rest on his shoulders in greasy strings. She speckled dust over his hiking boots and blackened his eyes to voids. Finally, she reached up and pressed his lips into a smile, revealing two crooked rows of teeth. He leered at her, taking the features she’d given him and making them his own.

Looking into that face was like staring into a vortex. Frightening. Mesmerising. Her thoughts spun deep into the obliterating dark and she let it fill her up until she became the monster. Moving through the dark without fear and knowing that she could strike terror with the mere twitch of her lips. She imagined all the things she might do with that kind of power. The games she could play. The victims she would prey on. Until she was gripped by the uneasy sense that someone – a real someone – was watching her.

Raffi blinked back to the present and scanned the surrounding scrub. ‘Who’s there?’

Heavy shadows reached from the bush and the lake’s surface was embered with the last of the day’s light. She frowned, confused. How long had she been daydreaming?

‘Priya? Mack?’

Only the wind replied, ruffling the pages of her notebook, and Raffi looked down to see that the page under her hand was almost full.

‘Weird . . .’ she muttered.

Out of curiosity, she flipped back to the previous page. And the page before that. As she did, she became aware of a cramping sensation in her right hand, as though she’d been writing non-stop for some time. Which she gathered she must have been, because while her imagined ghost held her in its thrall, a dozen pages of her notebook had been filled with her looping handwriting. She skipped back to the first page to read from the beginning. Parts of it were garbled and didn’t make sense. There were misspellings – lots of misspellings – and bits that didn’t connect. It needed a solid edit. But when she finally looked up again, she was smiling, because the wind, it appeared, had given her a story. And it was scary as hell.

SHELLEY

Shelley needed time alone. Time to pull herself together. After Ms Lim left, she called dibs on the single bedroom closest to the bathroom. It was slightly bigger than the other single at the front of the house, and she felt guilty for claiming it. At her old school she would have let the other girls pick first and taken whichever bed was left, but for this trip she couldn’t end up sharing. She needed her own space.

‘I don’t want to wake you if I’m up all night,’ she told Priya and Mack, one hand massaging her cramping abdomen.

Mack looked sympathetic but Priya gave her stink eye, as though the best room was hers by rights, then forced a shrug.

‘Whatever. I only need somewhere to park my stuff. I’ll take the double with Raffi, and you can have the other single,’ she said to Mack. ‘Unless you two want to share?’

‘No, I’m good on my own. Thanks,’ Mack replied, offering Priya a grateful smile.

It was obvious that Raffi had gone to the lake to avoid Mack. Shelley wondered what that was about, but decided it wasn’t her business. If they were focused on each other, at least they wouldn’t be thinking about her. She lugged her duffel bag to her room and felt her body sag with relief as she closed her door against the day. Tears stung her eyes and she bit her lip to keep from making a sound.

Her mum had assured her that St Augustine’s would be nothing like Belair High – no one knew her history here. But it didn’t matter what school Shelley went to or what her classmates knew about her, she would always be an outsider. Getting her period on the bus had been bad enough – and made worse by that arsehole Kyle rubbing her nose in it. But it was the way Mack looked at her on the fire track that sealed her fate. Shelley had outed herself as strange. Other. And there was no explaining that away.

From the moment they arrived in Baynton, there’d been a firm, insistent voice in Shelley’s ear warning her to get out. Get out! GET OUT! She’d put it down to nerves. The thought of sleeping in a house full of strangers already had her feeling anxious, and she hadn’t expected that the town would be so remote. So . . . hostile. The rocky ground was bone white and the gypsum appeared glassy at certain angles, reflecting spears of light. It made her feel unsteady. Nauseous. Intensifying her migraine to the point where she could hardly see and the warning voice in her ear had become a siren scream. GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!

She hadn’t heard the noise Mack mistook for a crying child. She had no memory of following her to the fire track. One minute she was outside the lodge with Priya, and the next she was standing too close behind Mack by the gate. The figure on the track was a dark blur in the middle distance. But she knew that shape. It walked in her nightmares. And to see it in broad daylight filled her with a dread too deep to name. Not here. Not now.

She’d wanted to scream. To run. But she was paralysed. The wind became a roar in her ears and her vision pulsed around the figure. She saw the towering shapes of pine trees and eucalypts stamped against the sky. Red as blood. Purple as a bruise.

He’s in the trees.

Her voice came to her as an echo. The words tasted sour and metallic and her body flushed with violent heat.

He’s in the trees.

But then the figure was gone. The sky was once more an aching blue and the fire track was empty. Shelley might have believed she’d imagined the whole thing if not for the way Mack stared at her with undisguised fear and disgust. As though she were the nightmare.

Maybe she was.

Her old classmates had looked at her the same way as they threw fistfuls of leaves and twigs at her back. Burn, bitch. That was the worst day. The final straw. Someone had told the principal, and her mum had arrived to take her home soon after. She’d watched dirt swirl around the shower drain while she washed the debris from her hair and listened to her mum pacing outside the bathroom on the phone to her dad, discussing what on earth they were supposed to do.

Back in the present, Shelley closed her eyes and slid to the floor with her back against the door. She didn’t understand what was wrong with her. Even before everything with Matthew, as far back as primary school, when the cliques were still elastic and kids invited the whole class to their birthday parties, Shelley had never fit. She’d liked the wrong TV shows. Said the wrong things. For a long time, she’d tried to fix herself by copying the other girls. When they became obsessed with Polly Pockets and Cabbage Patch Kids, and later Tamagotchis and jewel Lip Smackers, Shelley followed suit, using pocket money and birthday wishes to acquire the things that would prove she belonged. But within a week of her getting whatever was in demand, the other girls would lose interest. She papered her walls with posters of Freddie Prinze Jr, James Van Der Beek and Josh Hartnett. Watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Friends and Dawson’s Creek. She even taped Video Hits every Saturday, so she could watch the clips back and learn the dances. But she was always a step behind. Trying too hard. Missing the point. She’d wanted to believe that her old classmates were the problem. That she’d been a victim of bullying. Simple as that.

But lately she’d been wondering if they were right to be wary. To cast her out. Because it didn’t matter where Shelley went or how hard she tried to be like other girls, people seemed to sense that there was something off about her, and it was only a matter of time before she frightened them away.

MACK

They were supposed to cook dinner together. It was one of the few requirements on Retreat. The school assigned each group of lodgemates a budget and asked them to plan their menus and shopping lists in advance, as practice for when they moved out of home. But after Ms Lim made her visit, Shelley downed two ibuprofen and went to lie down, and Priya shut herself in the bathroom to priss herself up for Jase. Mack didn’t think either of them would eat. Shelley seemed too sick and Priya would no doubt want to keep her stomach flat for the party.

So, Mack ended up making nachos alone. It shouldn’t have been difficult – it was nachos, not Christmas lunch – but she felt at a loss in the unfamiliar kitchen. The casserole dish she found in the cupboard was sticky with old grease, and she didn’t know what temperature to preheat the lodge’s oven to, or what proportions of ingredients to use. Raffi was the chef. Mack listened for her return while she chopped capsicum for the salsa and grated cheese. But it was almost dark and the nachos had cooled to an oily, uneaten mess when she finally heard Raffi arrive through the front door.

‘Hello! Hello! Anyone here?’

She swept down the hall into the kitchen – eyes bright, hair wild from the wind – and stopped when she saw Mack sitting alone at the table.

‘Oh, hey!’ Her smile faltered and Mack felt her heart break a little further.

‘Hey, Raf.’

Raffi frowned at the mess in the kitchen. ‘You’ve made dinner already? What time is it?’

‘A bit after six. Want some?’ Mack nudged the nachos towards her.

Raffi looked back towards the hall, clearly willing the others to appear, before sampling a handful of semi-charcoaled chips.

‘Mmm, cheesy,’ she said, masking her grimace with a cough.

‘Be honest.’ Mack raised an eyebrow. ‘On a scale from yuck to inedible, how bad is it?’

‘Oh, food poisoning territory, for sure.’ Raffi offered the tiniest hint of a smile. ‘Good of you to cook though. Sorry I wasn’t here to help.’

Mack shrugged. ‘I needed an activity to take my mind off things – off the town,’ she clarified. ‘It’s eerie. And Shelley and I skipped lunch, so I figured we’d eat early.’

‘Where is Shelley?’ Raffi asked, worrying the silver cross at her throat.

‘Resting,’ Mack replied. ‘And Priya’s doing her make-up. Have you been at the lake this whole time?’ It hurt to see Raffi so uncomfortable in her presence and the words came out sharper than she intended, but Raffi had been gone for two hours – who sits and stares at a lake for two hours?

‘I was writing, Mack.’ Raffi’s tone warned against further questions, and Mack realised with a pang that she’d probably been with Sy.

She bit her lip and looked for the courage to say the things she’d been thinking all week: I had no right to kiss you unasked. I didn’t mean to disrespect your relationship with Sy, or surprise you with my feelings, or – worst of all – risk our friendship. I’m glad I was honest with you, but I should have handled it better.

Raffi seemed to have something she wanted to say, too, but before either of them could speak, Priya drifted in on a cloud of Tommy Girl.

‘Hey, you’re back!’ she said to Raffi. ‘I was starting to worry the drop bears had got you.’

She was wearing her gold-flecked contact lenses – her ‘party eyes’ as she called them – and had changed into hip-hugging jeans and a low-cut, V-neck top that showed off the silver Tiffany heart necklace Jase had given her for their anniversary. She’d also ironed the natural curl from her hair, plucked her eyebrows pencil thin and applied glittery eye make-up and wet-look lip gloss.

‘Where’s Shelley?’ she asked, heading for the cupboard where she’d stashed the vodka. ‘We’ve got a bonfire to build.’

They roused Shelley and found firewood stacked ready under a lean-to at the side of the house. Mack had been a Girl Guide in primary school and, while Raffi changed her outfit, she showed the others how to layer the large pieces of wood and smaller kindling over a ‘nest’ of dry grass and twigs. Darkness cloaked their shoulders as they worked, and by the time Mack held a match to the tinder and Raffi re-emerged, looking suitably witchy in a purple peasant skirt and velvety black cape (pinched from the Drama department), the evening was needled with stars.

Priya offered Mack the first swig of vodka. Mack hesitated. She still felt uneasy about its origins. But nothing had happened to Priya when she’d taken a drink that afternoon, and the night called for liquid courage. She allowed herself a small sip, putting the fire’s heat in her throat, before passing the bottle to Raffi as they found their places.

There were four log seats arranged around the fire. Raffi took the one downwind of the flames with her back to the bush and let the smoke cloud around her. Mack knew this was strategic. Raffi’s ghost stories often featured special effects, and she wouldn’t want her audience looking at her too closely. Also, the smoke would have her eyes red and streaming inside half an hour and the ash would give her a ghoulish pallor. Mack made for the opposite log, knowing that when the seance started they’d all be holding hands, but Priya beat her to it, shrugging by way of apology.

‘I don’t want my new jeans reeking of smoke.’

That left Mack and Shelley facing each other across the fire. Shelley still looked peaky and Mack wondered whether it was a good idea for her to be out of bed. Beads of sweat jewelled her hairline, and she kept blinking in a way that made Mack wonder if there was something wrong with her vision. Could her period really affect her that much? Or was she sick? That might also explain her behaviour on the fire track – the trance-like way she’d been staring at the hiker. And the weird thing she’d said about the trees. Whatever was going on with her, Mack hoped it wasn’t catching. While she prided herself on her ability to befriend just about anyone, when Shelley slipped her a shy smile across the flames, she felt something in her recoil.

Raffi cleared her throat to get their attention. ‘Before we begin, I must tell you that the spirits will only appear to those willing to receive them. Does each of you sit of your own volition, with open heart and open mind?’

Mack took a deep breath. The idea of calling up the dead scared her more than she liked to admit, but she trusted Raffi and felt safe knowing she was in control. She glanced at Priya, and they answered together: ‘We do.’

Raffi looked to Shelley, who eyed the dark over Mack’s shoulder before nodding her assent.

‘They need to hear you say it,’ Raffi prompted.

Shelley stared intently into the fire and Mack saw the flames twist behind her eyes. ‘I sit with open heart and open mind.’

There was an awkward pause, and Mack wondered if Shelley understood that this was a game.

But Priya seemed amused by her credulity. ‘Excellent. Now that we’re all agreed, I have a little something to broaden our perspective.’ She reached into the back pocket of her jeans and produced a pre-rolled joint.

‘No way!’ Raffi grinned.

Mack wasn’t so thrilled. ‘Did you find that with the vodka?’

‘Yeah, and the jar of cyanide pills.’ Priya’s voice dripped sarcasm, but Mack saw that she was hurt. ‘I bought it from Grady McGregor,’ she clarified. ‘His brother has a few plants and feeds them with compost he makes from his own food scraps. This is one hundred per cent premium, organic weed. Because my friends deserve the best and tonight is about having fun.’ She glared at Mack for added emphasis, then pulled a burning stick from the fire to light the joint and presented it to Shelley. ‘Guests first.’

Shelley stared at it as though Priya had handed her a loaded gun.

‘She’s sick, Priya.’ Mack hated that she sounded more like their babysitter than their friend, but she knew Priya would rain shit on Shelley if she refused, and, if she was honest with herself, she wasn’t sure she wanted to see Shelley high. Especially as Mack would likely be the one who had to look after her. She gave her what she hoped was a sisterly look across the fire. ‘You don’t have to.’

To Mack’s surprise, something close to irritation flashed across Shelley’s face.

‘I want to. I just haven’t tried it before,’ she said, accepting the joint from Priya. ‘No one’s ever offered.’

Priya raised an eyebrow at Mack as Shelley took a cautious puff: see.

Mack’s cloudy mood was infecting the group and she shook her head to clear it. ‘You’re right. We’re here to have a good time.’

Raffi handed her the spliff after taking her turn, and though Mack didn’t particularly like grass – in fact, she hated the disconnected, floaty-ness of the high – she liked the feel of Raffi’s fingers brushing against hers, and the sweet-tasting stamp of her plum lip gloss on the paper.

Relax, she told herself. Open heart, open mind. She imagined the smoke filling her up. Loosening her muscles. And when she opened her eyes again, she felt calmer, ready to be part of the circle.

‘So, do you all believe in this stuff?’ Shelley asked. ‘The supernatural?’

‘The important thing is that you’re willing to suspend your disbelief,’ Raffi replied.

‘Okay, but have any of you ever seen a ghost?’ Shelley pressed.

The fire crackled between them, and Mack felt the dark draw closer at her back.

‘I have,’ she said quietly.

The others looked to her, expectant. She never shared at seances. Calling on ghosts, real or imagined felt like courting danger. But she wanted to make Raffi a peace offering. The story was one she hadn’t thought about in years – a thing she’d pushed away around the time she grew out of playing dress-ups and make-believe. But now she called it to the surface.

‘I used to see a lady when I was little,’ she said. ‘She was Korean, same as me, and I called her “Emma”. Hide-and-seek was her favourite game. She’d show up in strange places: standing with the presenters on Play School, crouched with the treat jar on the top shelf of the pantry, or hanging upside down in the tree outside my window. And sometimes at night, when I couldn’t sleep, she would sit at the end of my bed and sing to me. It made her sad that I didn’t understand the words. It made me sad, too, but I was more upset when she left.’

‘You weren’t scared?’ Shelley asked.

Mack shook her head. ‘Never. I always felt safe when Emma was with me. Like she was protecting me. But she scared my parents.’

Mack closed her eyes, remembering the stricken look on her mum’s face when she told her about having a tea party with Emma in her cubby house.

‘You mean you were playing a game?’ her mum had asked, her smile stretching thin.

‘The tea party was a game,’ Mack remembered telling her. ‘But Emma is real.’

Later she’d found her mum crying in the kitchen, and it gave Mack an awful feeling that made her want to hide under a big pile of soft toys.

‘Emma had always been around, but I was six before I learned who she was. It happened by accident. I was snooping through the desk drawers in Mum’s study, looking for the tin of lemon drops she kept there, when I found a picture of Emma in a folder with a bunch of papers – adoption papers, as it turned out. Until then, I hadn’t considered what it meant that I looked different from the rest of my family. It was a shitty way to find out.

‘I started seeing Emma more after that. She took to hovering by Mum’s shoulder, and I would talk to her instead of Mum. It upset Mum so much that she took me to a child psychologist. He said Emma was my way of processing. That day in the study might have been the first time I was old enough to make sense of her photo, but it had always been in the house and I’d likely seen it before.

‘It was also likely that I’d overheard my parents talk about my adoption over the years, without fully understanding what it meant. The psychologist said that would have been very confusing and isolating for me, and that I’d been using Emma to get my parents to answer the questions I didn’t yet know how to ask. He was probably right. I saw Emma less once I came to terms with how our family worked.’

‘So, she wasn’t really a ghost?’ Shelley looked disappointed, and Mack felt a little stung that that was all she’d taken from the story.

But then Raffi reached out to touch her hand, and Mack forgot about Shelley.

‘Why Emma?’ she asked, her brow furrowed. ‘You kept repeating her name. If you imagined a ghost, why not call her something ghostly: the dark-haired lady? Mummy-in-the-mirror? The peekaBOO!?’

‘Because those are fucking terrifying?’ Priya replied.

But Mack was still looking at Raffi; of course she’d picked it. She’d never told Raffi this story. She hadn’t wanted Raffi to feel sorry for her or to imagine her as a confused little kid. But from the way Raffi was looking back at her, Mack understood that Raffi saw nothing weak in sharing this part of herself.

‘You’re right,’ she agreed. ‘It was a strange choice. I didn’t know anyone named Emma. The psychologist said I likely heard it on TV. Perhaps I had. But there’s one other thing you should know. Towards the end of primary school, my parents did a complete one-eighty. Suddenly it was important to them that I connect with my heritage. They took me to these Korean community fairs and meet-ups, started cooking Korean food and had a hanbok made for my birthday. They even enrolled me in Korean lessons for a while. Turns out, the Korean word for mum is: She pronounced it the way her teacher had: eomma. ‘Which, when you’re a little kid with a preschooler’s lisp, sounds like –’

‘Emma,’ Raffi whispered, a note of wonder in her voice. ‘It sounds like Emma.’

It felt like a good sign that Raffi was finishing her sentences again, and Mack took a chance and offered her a smile.

Raffi bit her lip and smiled back.

‘Do you still see her?’ Shelley asked, oblivious.

‘Who . . .?’

‘Your mum,’ Shelley said. ‘Emma.’

‘Oh – no. Not for years.’ Mack refocused her attention on the group. ‘But sometimes, when I’m right on the edge of sleep, I imagine I can hear her singing.’

‘That’s beautiful, Mack,’ Raffi said.

‘But she still might just be in your head, right? You could be making her up?’ Shelley persisted.

‘I guess . . .’ Mack shrugged, unsure whether it mattered or why Shelley seemed to care so much.

Priya widened her eyes at Mack: Who is this girl? Before turning her attention to Shelley. ‘What about you, Shelley? Have you ever seen a ghost?’

‘No.’ Shelley’s tone was flat and final.

‘Oh-kaaay. Well, I have a ghost story,’ Priya said, wiggling her fingers for Mack to pass the vodka.

‘So much for not believing,’ Raffi teased.

‘Oh, I’m one hundred per cent team sceptic – that’s how you know this is legit. Besides, it doesn’t matter what you believe.’ Priya flashed another pointed look at Shelley. ‘Everyone has a story. Maybe you wake in the night to see a shadowy figure in the corner that seems too real to be a dream. Or there’s a strange sound you sometimes hear when you’re home alone that you know, deep down, isn’t just the house settling. Or you see someone – just an ordinary someone – in a park or waiting at the bus stop or crossing the road in front of your car – and you sense there’s something wrong about them. That they aren’t what they seem or you shouldn’t be seeing them at all.’

Mack thought of the man she’d seen on the fire track – the way he’d smiled, as though he knew her – and felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck.

‘So, what’s your story?’ Mack’s words came out harsh.

‘Jeez, more like what’s up your arse tonight?’ Priya shot back. ‘I’m setting the scene. But whatever. When I was seven and my brother was five, my parents took us to Sydney.

‘We stayed at a holiday apartment in Manly, and after a full day of family sightseeing, my parents hired a babysitter so they could go out to dinner and see a show at the Opera House. My brother and I watched a movie and had pizza, then the babysitter put us to bed. But we didn’t go straight to sleep. The apartment overlooked the water with a view across the bay to the old quarantine station where they used to isolate sick people arriving in the harbour. Our babysitter – who, in hindsight, was pretty terrible at her job – told us that loads of people had died there in horrible ways and that it was super haunted. So haunted, that there wasn’t room for all the ghosts, and some of them liked to drift across the bay into Manly at night. She said that if we heard strange noises elsewhere in the apartment, we should stay in our room, and that she’d put a special spell on our door so the ghosts couldn’t come in.

‘The story scared us, but eventually my brother fell asleep. Not me though. I stayed up reading. And then, a little before ten pm, I heard this awful moaning coming from down the hall. It sounded as though someone was in pain or dying.’

Raffi cringed. ‘Please tell me seven-year-old Priya stayed in bed and ignored the sound.’

‘At first, yes. It hadn’t woken my brother and I figured I was just spooking myself,’ Priya continued. ‘But it kept getting louder, more intense, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I figured out what it was.

‘The hallway felt endless: full of shadows that hadn’t been there when we went to bed. I kept away from the walls, moving as quietly as I could towards the living room. As I got closer, there were these weird, wet sucking sounds and bumps beneath the moans. I thought I was going to walk in on some sickly ghoul crawling around. The living room door was closed, but I eased it open a crack, just enough to peek. Inside, the lights were off. The TV was on, but muted, casting a flickering glow over everything.

‘Our babysitter was on the couch with a blanket pulled up to her chest. But it was all wrong. Her head was thrown back, her hair had come loose from its ponytail and her eyes were closed. She might have been asleep, except her back was arched and the awful sounds I’d heard were coming from her mouth. I was scared that she was sick – she was all flushed and sweaty. And there was this huge shape moving under the blanket. Like something was eating her.’

Raffi gave a snort. ‘Sorry.’

‘What?’ Priya demanded.

Mack twigged to what Raffi was thinking and had to bite back her own smile.

‘Nothing.’ Raffi shook her head and made her expression serious once more. ‘What happened next?’

‘I ran back to my room and hid under the covers until my parents came home.’ Priya glanced around the fire, clearly annoyed that her story wasn’t having he desired effect. ‘It was the scariest night of my life! Do you think I’m making this up?’

‘No, I believe you witnessed some serious paranormal activity,’ Raffi said, fighting to keep her voice grave. ‘A real-life close encounter.’

‘Things going bump in the night,’ Mack agreed.

She risked a glance at Raffi, and it was too much. Raffi couldn’t hold in her giggles. And then Mack was laughing, too. A real tears-in-the-eyes belly laugh that the story didn’t really merit. But Raffi was laughing just as hard, and the more she laughed the more Mack laughed and it felt so good to share a joke. To share anything.

Priya flicked her gaze between them, bewildered. ‘I don’t get it.’

Mack tried to catch Shelley’s eye across the fire and include her in the joke, but Shelley was staring at the ground and hugging herself, as though the story made her uncomfortable.

Mack gulped a deep breath, calming down enough to speak. ‘I think what Raffi’s trying to say, is that the babysitter’s house –’ she waved a circle over her lap ‘– was being haunted.’

‘Lots of ectoplasm flying around,’ Raffi agreed, succumbing to a fresh bout of giggles.

‘But it wasn’t her house –’ Priya stopped herself as the realisation hit. ‘Oh. My God. You think the babysitter made a booty call?! Shit. That’s exactly what she did, isn’t it? She invited someone over and tried to scare us into staying in our room.’ She gave a squeal and covered her face with her hands, shoulders shaking with laughter. ‘Bad babysitter! I knew I was right to be a sceptic!’

For a moment it felt like old times. The good feeling restored between them.

‘You were a kid,’ Raffi said, still laughing. ‘You couldn’t have known what you were seeing. A ghost made sense. Lots of ghost stories are really just hanky-panky: doors creaking open in the middle of the night. Billowing curtains. Shadowy figures appearing by maidens’ bedsides and crawling up beneath the blankets. It’s not an accident that the modern ghost story showed up in Victorian England at the same time that women were considered “ruined” if they had sex out of wedlock.’

‘You think ghosts are metaphors?’ Shelley asked.

She was taking these stories so seriously, almost as though she were hoping that they could give her proof. Mack wondered about the boy from Shelley’s old school who’d died, and whether they’d been closer than Shelley let on.

‘Ghosts are the things in our past that we can’t give voice to,’ Raffi clarified. ‘Our fears. Our desires. Our trauma. And as long as they remain unacknowledged, they keep twisting in on themselves, becoming more powerful each time they return.’ She flashed a devious smile across the flames, making eye contact with each of them and daring them to meet her in a darker place. ‘And there is none so malicious, so . . . malevolent as Smiling Jack.’

Don’t say his name.

Mack tensed, remembering Ms Lim’s warning, and in her mind’s eye she saw the grinning figure waving at her on the fire track. She tucked her hands into the cuffs of her jumper and scanned the dark. Took another swallow of vodka as Priya passed it around.

He was just a man.

This is just a story.

RAFFI

Raffi surveyed her audience. The other girls were primed and on edge – exactly where she wanted them. She held her silence for a moment, letting them become aware of the quiet. Of the dark. Of the bush. As if on cue, the wind gusted up, stirring new sparks into the smoke. Mack flinched and Raffi slipped her a wink, reminding her that this was all in good fun, before starting in on her tale.

‘It’s not known for certain how long the entity that goes by the name of Smiling Jack has been in the park,’ she began. ‘No one can say how he got here, or why he came. But the first confirmed encounter occurred in nineteen seventy-eight. A surfing magazine in Sydney commissioned a feature on the park’s beaches and sent a writer, a photographer and a group of upcoming surfers here for a week to gather material for the piece.’

Scene set, she switched to present tense, summoning a vision of the past to shimmer over the flames.

‘The group arrive in their kombi and set up camp. It’s autumn: the light’s good and the swells are big, but it’s cold. The campgrounds are deserted and it seems the surfers have the entire park to themselves.

‘During their first surf, one of the party – the only female surfer in the group – notices a man watching them from the clifftop. He stays the whole time they’re in the water – close to two hours – but he’s gone when they climb back up to the car park. She thinks it’s odd that he didn’t stay to speak to them, given his interest, and she mentions it to one of the others, but he shrugs her off. Says he didn’t notice anyone. And she puts it out of her mind.

‘The next day, they head to a different beach, and the guy shows up again. He keeps his distance, watches them surf and disappears as they get out of the water. The woman finds him creepy. But he’s not harassing them or causing any trouble. He’s just watching.

‘But on the third day, things get weird. The woman wakes around dawn, needing to wee. The others are still sleeping and it’s not yet fully light when she climbs out of her tent. Which is why she doesn’t see the man until she’s halfway across the campground to the long drop. He’s standing by the path leading to the beach, watching her. And this time –’ Raffi leaned forward so that the firelight played over her face ‘– he’s smiling.’

Mack drew up her knees to hug them tight against her chest. ‘How did you come up with this?’

Raffi wanted to tell the truth: that she’d fallen outside of time and come back with the story. Some might call it ‘flow state’, but she preferred to think of it as automatic writing – as though something had been speaking through her. It was the kind of creepy detail that would tip things over the edge. But the whole point of sharing scary stories was to gather close – an excuse to be vulnerable and open with one another in the dark – and she didn’t want to frighten Mack away.

‘It’s just a story,’ Raffi assured her.

Priya took another swallow of vodka and offered the bottle back to Mack. ‘Don’t wreck the mood.’

‘The woman is spooked to find the man at their campsite,’ Raffi said, picking up where she left off. ‘She doesn’t know how long he’s been there, or if this is the first time he’s hung around their tents while they slept. The thought chills her and she asks the man who he is and what he wants. He’s close enough to hear her – there’s maybe ten metres between them – but he just keeps smiling at her, saying nothing. As her eyes adjust to the dawn light, she sees his skin is chalky pale, and his eyes are black – reabsorbing the dark as the sun comes up.

‘She calls to the others, but no one stirs or comes out of their tent. She yells again – louder this time – and still no one comes. The man keeps watching her with the same eerie smile. He doesn’t appear to have a weapon, but she’s suddenly very afraid of what she’ll find when she looks inside the other tents. She picks up a large stick and tells the man not to come any closer. His grin stretches wider. Mocking her. Then he lifts his hand in a wave and walks away, taking the path to the beach.’

‘Wait, what?’ Priya laughed. ‘He waved at her? But that’s so –’

‘Creepy,’ Mack breathed, still hugging her knees and hanging off Raffi’s every word. ‘He’s dead creepy, Raf.’

‘Isn’t he just?’ Raffi flashed them all a grin worthy of her ghost and let her gaze come to rest on Priya, leering at her without blinking until Priya threw up her hands.

‘Fine! Yes! Smiling Jack is very scary. Please continue.’

‘The surfer doesn’t know what to make of her encounter with the man, but she’s freaking out. Everyone else is still in their tents and the campsite feels too quiet. Too still. Not wanting to find out why that might be, she decides to follow the man. The beach where he was headed is separated from the campsite by sand hills, and the path he took is the only access point. But when she follows it to the other side of the dunes, she finds the beach deserted. There are no footprints in the sand, and the man is gone.’

Priya chimed in with the X Files theme, and Raffi waited her out. If she was interrupting, it was because she was nervous. Mack took another sip of vodka and Shelley looked apprehensive, her eyes searching the dark. Thrilled to see her story working its spell, Raffi leaned in so that the fire cast strange shadows over her face as she continued.

‘The surfer finds the others awake when she arrives back at camp. Nothing’s been stolen and no one is hurt. If any of them heard her screaming, they give no sign. She plays it cool: says she’s been out for a walk. Being featured in the magazine is a big opportunity for her. She was hired as eye candy for the piece, but she’s out to prove that she can surf as well or better than any of the guys. Out on the water, she’s focused on her form and showing off her skills. She wants the world to admire the way she and her board become one with the waves, and how steady she is, holding her nerve as she shoots through barrel after barrel. Speed and grace. She does not want word getting around the beaches back home that she was high maintenance on this trip, freaking out over some camper who came to watch them surf.

‘But before they head out to that day’s shoot, she speaks to the photographer – the only other woman on the trip – and tells her about the strange man. The photographer has also noticed him hanging around, and agrees he’s a little creepy.

‘Later that day, the photographer sees him watching from the sand dunes. And she takes his picture, just in case, figuring they can show it to the police if he causes any trouble.

‘The surfers spend a week in the park, all up. The women see the man every day, though he disappears when they try to point him out to the rest of their party. He’s always smiling – leering – but he keeps his distance.

‘Once they’re back in Sydney, he becomes a footnote to the trip. Some weirdo with a surfer fetish. Neither the surfer nor the photographer thinks about him again until the photographer develops her photos. And this is where things get really strange. The photographer is certain the man had been standing still when she took his picture, and she’d been using a tripod to keep the shot steady, but his image is blurred. He almost appears to be running at the camera. Only his eyes are in focus. Two black marks burned into the film. And he’s angry. Roaring. Holding the print, the photographer feels he might come rampaging out of the shot.

‘Shaken, she sets the image aside – keeps it face down on her workbench so she doesn’t have to look at it – and calls the surfer. But before the surfer ever sees the photo, the photographer’s studio catches fire. All her work from the trip burns up, including the man’s photo. The photographer has a nervous breakdown soon after. Dies in hospital. The doctors say it’s heart failure, but her face is all twisted, and the nurse who’s on duty at the time insists the photographer died screaming. Scared to death.’

Raffi left an ominous pause, letting her final words hang over the flames.

‘Is that it?’ Shelley asked, sounding disappointed.

Raffi frowned; she’d been proud of that ending. ‘That was it for the photographer,’ she said, improvising. ‘But not for Smiling Jack. The surfer eventually returned to the park. Many times, in fact. The beaches here have some of the country’s best waves. She never saw the smiling man again, but she met other women who had. She told them what had happened to the photographer. Warned other campers never to take his picture. Smiling Jack is a sightseer, she’d tell them. He likes to look at things. Girls, mostly. And he likes them to know that he’s watching, but he doesn’t like it when that gaze is returned.’

‘Okay, enough or I won’t sleep!’ Priya laughed, covering her ears.

‘Didn’t think you and Jase were planning to,’ Raffi volleyed.

‘But it doesn’t make sense . . .’ Shelley whispered. Her gaze had drifted over Raffi’s shoulder and she squinted, her head tilting as she fixed on something in the dark beyond.

‘What doesn’t?’ Mack asked, following her gaze, and Raffi fought the urge to look behind her.

Shelley blinked her focus back to the fire. ‘Smiling Jack. Who is he? And why does he haunt this particular park – did he die here?’

Her tone was earnest and she seemed to expect genuine, fact-based answers. It was disconcerting. But she’d also played right into Raffi’s trap.

‘There are plenty of theories,’ Raffi said. ‘But there’s only one way to find out for sure.’ She cast a daring look around the fire. ‘Let’s put your questions to Smiling Jack.’

PRIYA

Raffi’s seances were the stuff of legend. Reserved for those who made it to the vulnerable hour at the ragged end of parties and sleepovers. The spirits never failed to show and, with Raffi’s penchant for drama and encyclopedic horror knowledge, you never knew who or what – funny or frightening – might come through.

Priya liked to think of herself as unflappable. Up for anything. Though, really, she was more stubborn than stoic. She and Raffi had bonded over their shared love of horror films, but while Raffi delighted in their gory thrills, Priya liked the challenge of sitting with her fear, and the rush she felt when she resisted the urge to cover her eyes. For her, it was always a relief to make it to the cathartic, penultimate scene before the final knife-twist when the evil is vanquished and the hero staggers into the dawn, bleeding and broken but alive.

She looked across the fire at her friend, trying to gauge how far Raffi intended to push things tonight. Raffi gave nothing away, but Priya hoped she was picking up on the group’s nervy energy and would play it light. Though she was loath to admit it, the Smiling Jack story had creeped her out and she was already dreading the long walk through the dark to Jase’s lodge. The last thing she needed was Raffi going full-tilt Stephen King on them.

‘So, how does this work?’ Shelley looked twitchy. Like she might be sick. ‘Can you summon anyone? Do you control who comes through?’

Can you chill? Priya had to bite her tongue to keep from saying it. From the moment they lit the fire, Shelley had been way too intense, questioning everyone’s stories without offering one of her own. Priya lit a second joint and passed it to Shelley with a thin smile.

‘Take the edge off. And you’re welcome.’

The girl had no manners.

‘I never call friends or family,’ Raffi said, in answer to Shelley’s question. ‘And the spirits aren’t to be trusted. They’re not always what they seem. Which is why we use protection.’ She stood up, producing a plastic canister of table salt from behind her log, and started walking clockwise around the fire, sprinkling a line of salt in her wake.

‘Salt purifies,’ she explained. ‘Spirits and demons can’t cross it. So long as the circle remains unbroken, nothing can harm us. Now, hold out your hands.’ She measured a pinch of salt into each of their palms. ‘Swallow it – it’s as good as holy water – and make sure you wash it down,’ she added with a wink, plucking the vodka from beside Mack as she made her way back to her seat.

Priya turned to Shelley, gesturing for the joint, and caught her subtly tip the salt from her palm before she licked it. What was this girl’s deal? Given she seemed so wary of supernatural forces, it was weird that Shelley wouldn’t do this small thing to protect herself. And weirder still that she would try to hide it. She tried to catch Raffi’s eye – to see whether she’d clocked it – but Raffi was distracted, sharing a private look with Mack, and Priya hoped she knew what she was doing.

‘We begin by holding hands and closing our eyes,’ Raffi said as she settled back on her log. ‘Imagine there’s a cord of light flowing between us. Positive energy passing from hand to hand.’

Priya stubbed out the joint to save for later and tried to concentrate. But when Shelley took her hand, she felt the darkness tilt. Instead of light flowing between them, she saw blood welling from cuts in their palms, mixing together as it ran over their fingers. The vision was so vivid that Priya opened her eyes and tried to pull free of Shelley’s grip, convinced it was somehow real. But there was no blood and Shelley was stronger than she looked, keeping a firm hold of her hand, as though nothing were amiss.

‘This is the energy that surrounds our work tonight,’ Raffi continued, glaring at Priya until she closed her eyes again. ‘It seals our circle and protects us from any that would do us harm. No matter what happens, or what manifests, the bond between us may not be broken until the spirits are farewelled and the ritual complete.’ She lowered her voice to an ominous pitch. ‘For to sever the connection is to invite the dead to walk unchecked among us. Now, strong in our light, we welcome the dark and raise our hands to Mother Night.’

Priya felt Shelley and Mack tug at her hands and lifted her arms with theirs to the sky.

‘Come, spirits!’ Raffi cried.

Mack squeezed Priya’s hand as they echoed Raffi’s summons and Priya squeezed back: this was their game. They were in control.

‘Come, spirits!’

‘Heed our call!’

‘Heed our call!’

‘Make your presence known!’

‘Make your presence known!’

They repeated the chant three times, and with each repetition all that was ordinary and familiar receded a little further, and the dark pressed in.

‘Open your eyes.’

A bank of clouds had drifted overhead, swallowing the stars. Beyond the fire, the night was a void and Mack and Shelley’s faces flickered at the edge of the light. Across the flames, Raffi had donned a black lace veil that covered her head and most of her body. This was a new twist. Raffi still had her eyes closed and held herself very still: a vessel waiting to be filled. Priya shivered in her thin top and told herself she was just cold.

‘What are we –?’ Shelley didn’t get any further.

Raffi trembled, her body vibrating beneath the shroud. She began to shake. To jerk. A large something pulling her this way and that. Dragging her head in slow revolutions. Trying her on for size. Her breath came in short, shallow huffs. Faster and faster. Her spine straightened. Her eyes snapped open. The something had her by the face, was pulling her up, out of her seat. Raffi’s body went rigid, straining to keep hold of Mack and Shelley’s hands. With the veil floating around her, she appeared to hover above the log, her gaze fixed on the invisible thing that gripped her. She inhaled – a long, sucking gasp – and her mouth stretched impossibly wide behind the lace as the entity forced its way in. Then she fell back into her seat, her body slack and her head slumped forward. A marionette with its strings cut.

For a long moment, the only sound was the fire’s crack and hiss.

‘Raffi?’ Shelley sounded frightened and looked to Priya and Mack for reassurance. ‘Is this what’s supposed to happen? Is she okay?’

Mack bit her lip, uncertain, and Priya had to hand it to Raffi: she was turning in an Oscar-worthy performance – far more convincing than her usual schtick. But it was an act. It had to be.

‘She’s fine,’ she assured Shelley, mustering more confidence than she felt. ‘It’s all part of the show.’

As if on cue, Raffi gave a low growl. More dog than girl. A low rumble rising in pitch until it became a high, child-like giggle. Her shoulders shook and her hair fell away from her face behind the filmy veil as she lifted her head. She wore a sweet expression, but her eyes had rolled back to show their veiny whites.

Priya startled and covered with a laugh. ‘Dude, you are getting too good at this.’ Subtext: This is not fun. We are not entertained. Rein it in. ‘Who are you tonight?’

The thing that looked like Raffi erupted in new giggles. ‘Kitty McCrae speaking,’ she said in a thick Scottish brogue. ‘How may I direct your call?’

Priya’s shoulders sank with relief, and she felt silly for even sort-of imagining there might be anything sinister going on. Kitty was Raffi’s ‘spirit guide’. If her story was to be believed, she’d been born in 1696, stole aboard a merchant ship at fifteen and went on to become one of the most fearsome pirates that history forgot. She was often the first to show up at Raffi’s seances, (though usually with less theatre) and would make wisecracks at Raffi’s expense before procuring a cast of willing souls for the sitters to speak with.

‘Och! I see we have a wee newcomer with us this evening!’ Raffi – or, rather, Kitty – snaked her head towards Shelley, regarding her with unseeing eyes. ‘How you doing, lovey? These three been making ye welcome?’

Shelley finally cracked a smile. ‘Raffi’s a weirdo, but the others are all right.’

‘It’s the strange ones that keep things interesting, lassie.’

Raffi’s body was hunched and her neck cranked forward so that her head seemed to float behind the veil.

‘Speaking of weirdos,’ Priya interrupted. ‘We want to speak with Smiling Jack.’

Raffi’s face clouded, her smile pinching thin. ‘No ye don’t. Any but him.’

Priya glanced at her watch. It was almost nine; she needed to leave for the boys’ lodge soon or Jase would start to worry. ‘It’s getting late and he’s the only ghost for us tonight.’

‘Jackie en’t your garden-variety bogle. The entity that goes by that name is evil.’ The fire danced over Raffi’s blinded eyes. ‘Pure. Evil.’

Mack shot Priya an uneasy look, her shoulders tensed against the dark: Ms Lim had said the same thing. Those exact words. But so had almost everyone who’d ever told a scary story.

‘He’s here, then?’ Priya said, prompting Raffi to speed things up.

‘Ay, he’s about. And he’s veeeeeeerrry much aware of you, lassies. I would nae fetch him for all the doubloons in Anne Bonny’s cache. But –’ Raffi-slash-Kitty hesitated, as though being forced to share against her will. ‘– if ye were each to hold him in ye minds and speak his name thrice, it would summon him.’

‘The Candyman’s five times,’ Priya said, reminding herself and the others that Raffi was pulling from the movies. Putting on a show.

Raffi-slash-Kitty’s expression remained grave. ‘Three is the binding number.’

‘Are we sure about this?’ Mack asked in a small voice.

Her fear irritated Priya. Maybe because, deep down, she felt it, too. And that pissed her off. She wasn’t about to lose her nerve over a camp-fire ghost story.

‘This pervy ghost has been terrorising people for years, and I, for one, want to hear what he has to say for himself.’ She beamed a challenge across the fire: Do your worst, Raf, and forced herself to picture the pale, grinning figure Raffi had described.

‘Smiling Jack.’

‘Godspeed, lassies.’ Raffi’s eyes closed and her body went limp, sagging away from the fire with her head lolling towards her shoulder, as though the life had flown from her. Her veiled face was almost completely in shadow and cold bloomed white from her lips through the lace.

In her mind’s eye, Priya saw the figure striding closer, his footfalls keeping time with Raffi’s quickening breath.

‘Smiling Jack.’

Raffi’s eyes flew open, the whites still showing and seeming almost to glow in the dark. The man’s face filled Priya’s mind. Her thoughts were teeth.

‘Smiling Jack.’

The night shifted and slid.

He was there. A grinning death’s head pressing out of the dark above Raffi. White and terrible, the fire gleaming cold in his eyes.

‘Fuck! Raffi, behind you!’ Priya cried, pulling free of Mack and Shelley’s hands as she half-fell, half-scrambled backwards off the log.

In the same instant, Raffi’s head snapped back as someone or something yanked her veil and she screamed, kicking out in her struggle to pull free. Dirt and leaves sparked as they hit the flames. An ember landed on the pooled hem of her veil and, in half a second, it was alight. Mack was already on her feet, clawing at the lace as flames licked up the fabric and Raffi fought to free herself before her clothes or hair caught. They were all screaming. Everything was noise and confusion. Priya struggled to make sense of what was happening. Of what she’d seen. Her nerves sang with fright. Then the lace was on the ground. Raffi sank back onto her log, looking stunned, as Mack stamped out the flames and kicked the smouldering mess into the fire.

They stared at each other, stunned and breathing hard, as the fire crackled between them. Mack was the first to recover, feeling for her torch with a shaky hand and shining the beam over Raffi’s clothes.

‘Are you hurt?’

Raffi shook her head and hugged herself tight. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I’m okay.’

‘What was that?’ Priya demanded.

Raffi rubbed the back of her head in a daze. ‘You tell me. Did you put Jase up to this?’

‘Jase? That thing wasn’t Jase!’ But as her heart steadied and she brushed the dirt from her new jeans, Priya realised it wasn’t Smiling Jack either. It had to have been Sy, or one of Raffi’s theatre friends in disguise. Raffi had planned this, just as she’d planned everything else that night, and Priya had fallen for it.

‘Bravo, Raf. Nice twist, but you can drop the act now.’ She reached for her torch and aimed the beam at the dark over Raffi’s shoulder. ‘You hear that out there? The game’s up. Show yourself.’

But the bush held tight to its secrets.

‘I didn’t plant anyone, Priya.’ Raffi sounded sincere. Her best acting yet. ‘The seance, Kitty – that was me. But do you really think I’d have someone wait out there all this time, for a jumpscare?’

It was one hundred per cent something Raffi would do, and Priya gave her a look that told her as much.

‘What did you see, Priya?’ Mack asked.

Priya threw up her hands, exasperated. ‘I saw a face. A pale, grinning face. Same as Raffi described in her story. And it scared the shit out of me.’ She rounded on Raffi again. ‘Is that what you want to hear? Was it worth setting yourself on fire for?’

‘No!’ Raffi looked wounded.

‘Hey, guys . . .’ Mack frowned and cast her torch in wide arc. ‘Where’s Shelley?’

Shelley. Of course.

Her log was empty, but Priya hadn’t seen her leave.

‘Oi, Shelley!’ she called.

There was no reply and Mack looked uneasy. ‘How long has she been gone?’

Priya rewound the last few minutes. ‘She was holding my hand until I saw the face.’

‘And she pulled away from me when Priya screamed,’ Raffi added. ‘She could have been the one who grabbed my hair.’

Mack’s frown deepened. ‘So, where is she? Shelley? SHELLEY?’

Their torch beams sliced the dark, revealing stripes of empty bush.

‘Shit. She’s not well,’ Mack said, panic creeping into her voice. ‘What if she took something that doesn’t mix with weed and alcohol?’

Priya’s weed. Not technically her vodka, but she’d been the one to pass it around. And she wasn’t going to risk being barred from the formal because Shelley couldn’t handle herself.

‘To be clear, no one made Shelley do anything,’ she replied. ‘Besides, she seemed fine, and she’s only been gone a minute. She should still be able to hear us.’

‘SHELLEY!’ Mack tried again. They all did. Calling her name over and over. But the dark gave nothing back.

‘Maybe she’s messing with us?’ Raffi suggested.

‘If she is, it’s not funny,’ Mack said. ‘Aim your torches at the ground and we’ll walk a spiral out from the fire. We should be able to find her footprints. Figure out which way she went.’

They fell silent, listening for any sound that might point them to Shelley’s whereabouts as they scanned their torches in a slow circle. But there were too many sets of prints crossing over each other to determine which might be hers, and there was no sound, save for the fire’s murmur and the wind moving through the bush.

‘What if she’s hurt?’ Mack said after a minute. ‘What if something . . . took her?’

‘Like what? Aliens? There’s nothing out here!’ But there had been something. An impossible something, grinning at Priya through the dark.

‘Or here’s a theory,’ Raffi said, brightening as she shone her torch towards the lodge where someone had switched on the lights. ‘Maybe she went to the bathroom?’

Mack exhaled in relief. ‘She might have told us.’

Priya switched off her torch, feeling annoyed with herself for worrying. Shelley was fine, and ghosts weren’t real. ‘She’s not five, Mack. She doesn’t need our blessing.’

‘I’m going to check on her. Make sure the seance didn’t freak her out.’

Mack started towards the lodge, but didn’t get more than halfway to the back door before a voice by Priya’s ear called her back.

‘I’m right here, Mack.’

Priya startled as Mack swung her torch around to illuminate Shelley standing between her and Raffi, just shy of the fire’s light.

‘The fuck did you come from?’ Priya demanded, fighting to keep the fear out of her voice.

They’d been scanning their torches all around. There’s no way they could have missed her or failed to hear her approach. Where the hell had she been? And why hadn’t she answered them?

‘Are you okay?’ Mack asked. ‘We were worried.’

‘I don’t feel well,’ Shelley replied, her voice flat.

No shit, Priya thought, scrunching her nose. She smelled rank. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused. There was vomit at the corners of her mouth and her hands and the knees of her cargo pants were chalky with gypsum dust, as though she’d been crawling through the scrub.

‘I’m going to bed,’ she told them.

‘Do you want one of us to come with you?’ Mack asked.

Priya caught the slight hesitation in her voice and knew she wasn’t the only one weirded out by Shelley’s appearance. Under normal circumstances, Mack wouldn’t take no for an answer. It wouldn’t even be a question. But Shelley shook her head, her expression still blank as she started walking towards the lodge, and Mack didn’t offer a second time.

‘Let us know if you need anything!’ Priya called after her. ‘Cup of tea? Ibuprofen?’ She lowered her voice. ‘An exorcist? What the fuuuuuuck?’ she mouthed to the others as they watched Shelley shuffle away. ‘Where did she go? And what was that smell?’

‘Covet,’ Raffi said.

‘What?’

‘It’s a cologne. Sy wears it sometimes. And whisky. She smelled of Covet and whisky.’

Of course. Priya had been right the first time. ‘Interesting. Remind us, Raf: where is your boyfriend tonight?’

Raffi glared at her. ‘I know how it looks, but it’s not him. I didn’t tell him about the seance. And even if he came out here to trick us, he would have given himself up when he saw that Shelley was sick.’

Priya agreed that it’d be skeezy and out of character for Sy to stay hidden, but that didn’t rule him out. ‘Someone’s messing with us.’ She raised her voice to address the dark. ‘Some immature little shit who isn’t half as funny as they think they are.’

Mack shook her head. ‘Shelley looked really out of it. Maybe we should get Ms Lim?’

‘And tell her what?’ Priya demanded. ‘That we got Linda Blair smashed? Shelley just needs to sleep it off.’

‘I’m worried about her,’ Mack said. ‘I didn’t tell you this before – it didn’t seem important – but we met a man, a smiling man, on the fire track earlier this afternoon. Shelley started acting all weird when she saw him, same as she was just now. And the man – I don’t know how to explain it, but I had this terrible feeling when I looked at him, as though I shouldn’t have been seeing him at all.’

‘And what?’ Priya demanded. ‘You think it was the ghost?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ Mack said in a small voice.

Priya shook her head. Shook away the terrible image of that white, grinning face pressing out of the dark. ‘Mr Wallace told us there’d be people visiting the town. You saw a hiker, Mack. He smiled at you because that’s what you do when you meet people in the middle of nowhere. It’s polite.’

‘Priya’s right, Mack,’ Raffi assured her. ‘Smiling Jack is just a story.’

Mack remained unconvinced. ‘We broke the circle,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘Shelley didn’t swallow the salt and we didn’t farewell the spirit.’

‘Because there is no spirit,’ Priya said, irritated. ‘We got drunk, and the game got away from us. That’s all this is.’

‘I think we should finish it,’ Mack said. ‘To be safe.’

Priya didn’t like this. If the thing she saw over Raffi’s shoulder wasn’t Sy or another one of Raffi’s friends, then it was the weed. The vodka. Her imagination kicking into overdrive. She shouldn’t have allowed herself to lose control. It was weak. She rolled her eyes and opened her arms to the night to show how very unafraid she was.

‘O, Smiling Jack, we expel you from this place! So long! Farewell! Fuck off!’

The night made no reply.

Priya checked her watch and shook her head. ‘I’m out, too – Jase is waiting.’

She was pissed at Raffi for taking the seance too far. And annoyed at Mack for falling for it, and Shelley for putting the creep on them with her disappearing act. But most of all she was angry with herself for failing to keep her cool. So much for their girls’ night. Before Mack inevitably repeated Ms Lim and Mr Wallace’s warning not to leave the lodge, Priya scooped up the half-empty vodka bottle and shone her torch towards the main track. ‘See you at sunrise.’

SHELLEY

The Bad Thing was happening again. Shelley’s pulse was a hammer in her ears and her vision jumped with every beat. She needed to get inside, away from the other girls. The ground dipped and swayed, and each step towards the back door took all her concentration, as though she were walking in a stranger’s skin. Looking back, she saw Mack, Priya and Raffi huddled close by the fire. She could tell by their crossed arms and tense expressions that she’d scared them. They wouldn’t want anything to do with her now. And perhaps that was for the best.

It’d been a mistake to join their circle. She should have known better. Should have realised how it would end. She’d been determined to keep to herself. But despite how weird the other girls surely found her, Mack had still invited her to the fire.

Sit with us.

Priya had offered her first puff of the joint.

Share our secrets.

Raffi had reached for her hand in the dark.

Play our game.

And Shelley had allowed herself to hope. She could be their fourth. Sleep over at their houses. Swim in their pools – they seemed the sort of girls whose families had swimming pools – and catch the bus to town with them on Friday afternoons. Walk up and down the mall arm in arm, sharing bags of Macca’s fries. Just to be seen. Together.

But no. None of that would happen. Not now.

Shelley stood blinking back tears in the mudroom, mouth foul with sick, telling herself she didn’t care. Her head hurt. Her eyes hurt. Why were all the lights on? She sniffed and took a step towards the hall. Every door was open, and every room was lit. But that wasn’t right. The mudroom and kitchen both had windows overlooking the fire pit – she should have seen the lights from where she was sitting – but they had been surrounded by dark during the seance. It was part of what made it so spooky. Maybe one of the girls had come inside looking for her? But no, Mack had been on her way to do just that when Shelley returned to herself. Shelley stared at the lights. Could she have done this? Time was still skipping and slippery. The night fragmented.

Music drifted through her head. A song by No Doubt. The one Shelley didn’t listen to anymore. But she found herself humming along. And beneath the smell of burned nachos and chalky damp, there was something sour: anger and unwashed skin. The faintest whiff of Covet. She was going to be sick again.

She managed to grab her toiletries bag and make it to the bathroom. She avoided looking in the mirror as she brushed her teeth and tried to puzzle out what had happened at the seance. Where she’d gone in that censored time between Priya’s scream and when she found herself back at the fire. She’d been fine until then, enjoying herself even. It was clear the other girls didn’t really believe in the supernatural but the seance was still creepy, in a fun way, and the weed had dulled her cramps and mellowed her out enough that she’d been able to put the worst of the afternoon behind her.

But that all changed when Priya called on Smiling Jack. Shelley remembered the dread chord vibrating in her gut with each repetition of his name. She’d seen firelight lick over hungry eyes and felt the night throb with malice. Something had heard them. Something had come, creeping through the dark.

People talked about ‘seeing red’. That’s what it had felt like when that something arrived: a crimson sheet knotting tight across Shelley’s eyes, hot metal on her tongue and her nerves singing with rage. Her pulse had become a siren, and the world strobed to its beat. She’d lost all sense of time and space. It left her disoriented, her senses burned out and glitching.

Now in the bathroom, she thought to check her clothes. Make sure there was no blood. Not like last time. She looked down. With relief, she saw that her hands were shaking, but clean. She was clean.

The psychologist her parents had been making her see since Matthew’s death said these episodes were panic attacks, and that the gaps in her memory were her mind’s way of protecting itself. A survival instinct. Common in people who have witnessed traumatic events. But Shelley wasn’t convinced. What she experienced during these moments was closer to rage than panic. Everything within her screaming: NO! NO! NO! Screaming with such force, such violence, it terrified her.

Shelley’s body had always felt alien. It didn’t look or move the way she wanted it to, or the way TV shows and magazines told her it was supposed to. For years she’d tried to control it. To contain all that hair and grease and fat and sweat and puss. But no matter how much she plucked, scrubbed and purged, her body continued to ooze and sprout. As though it had a mind of its own. And then, the morning after the worst night of her life, she had woken to find that the person staring back at her in the mirror was no longer merely strange, but a stranger. Something rotten had lodged deep within. Shelley could feel it festering. It twisted her thoughts. Kept her apart. And her body had become a living nightmare she couldn’t escape.

She had wanted to cut herself free. It was a dangerous thought. A waiting blade that she couldn’t seem to put away. You were supposed to ask for help when you felt that way. But that would have meant talking about Matthew. What they were to each other. The things they had done.

She closed her eyes. Felt his lips brush close by her ear.

Can I trust you to keep a secret, Shelley?

When she opened her eyes again, he was there in the bathroom mirror. Eyes gouged to voids, his jaw ripped loose in an endless scream.

And he was coming for her.

Spidering through the mirror on broken arms.

The room beat red, and she couldn’t move.

His breath was hot and putrid as he rose to his full height before her, dripping blood on the bathroom floor. Had she really thought she could outrun him? That she could put on a new school uniform and become a different person?

His laughter echoed beneath distant thunder and he clawed at her waist, hooking his nails deep beneath her skin. Dragging her back, back, back through the trees in Weemala Reserve. Through sheeting rain, hissed taunts and damning glances. Back to the locked door in her mind. To the scent of Covet and whisky. No Doubt on her CD player. And the Bad Thing endlessly repeating in the semi-dark.

RAFFI

Raffi didn’t believe in ghosts any more than she believed in demons, vampires or the bogeyman. But she believed in hauntings. Bad things happened; sometimes they left a mark. There were houses you shouldn’t sleep in. Objects you shouldn’t touch. And if a person claimed to see a ghost, it usually meant they had a secret. Something big and painful, buried deep. Because horror stories are human stories. Always. She didn’t know Shelley, but her vanishing act was troubling. She’d looked so strange when she returned. A different person almost. And for one breathless, nauseating second, Raffi had glimpsed something violent and terrible looking back at her through Shelley’s eyes. Gone as quickly as it appeared. A trick of the firelight. But now that she’d seen it, she knew: Shelley Martin was haunted.

‘The seance was a bad idea,’ she said to Mack.

They stood together, watching as Priya’s torch beam was swallowed by the bush and the lights in the lodge went dark one by one. Raffi wanted to call the other girls back. Apologise. She’d meant to entertain them. Have a little fun. But she’d gone too far. Was always going too far. And now she was alone with Mack, heart hot in her throat and unsure how to make things right.

‘How’d you do it?’ Mack asked.

Raffi frowned, confused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The face Priya saw. The thing that yanked your veil.’ Mack was half-smiling, but her eyes scanned the dark. ‘It’s just us now, you can say.’

Raffi wanted to pull back the curtain and assure Mack there was nothing to be afraid of. But she could only give her the truth.

‘It wasn’t a trick. Priya was tipsy and primed – she was always going to see a ghost.’

‘Something grabbed you, Raffi,’ Mack insisted.

A firm, cold hand reaching from the dark.

‘That could have been Shelley,’ Raffi reasoned. And if not Shelley, then Raffi had done it subconsciously, same as when she used her ouija board and the planchette appeared to move of its own accord.

‘Or it was Sy.’ Mack scuffed dirt into the fire, making it hiss. ‘How do I know he isn’t out here with his camera filming all this? That you and your theatre friends haven’t planned some elaborate prank?’

Raffi stared at her, dismayed. She could still feel the warm press of Mack’s fingers entwined with hers, and the giddy, fading hope that they might find a new way back to each other. ‘You think I’d set you up? To be laughed at?’

Mack crossed her arms and shrugged.

Raffi’s eyes felt hot. Her chest suddenly tight. Did Mack really not trust her? Had she hurt her that much?

‘Sy’s not here,’ she said, fighting to keep her voice steady. ‘In fact, I’m pretty sure this is the last place he’d choose to be.’ She sank down on one of the logs – needed to be sitting for this – and stared at the flames. ‘We broke up.’

It was still hard to say. The words cutting fresh.

She’d made herself do it face-to-face. She’d owed him that – had gone to his house with the DVDs he’d lent her wrapped in the jumper of his that she’d liked to sleep in, and felt her heart break alongside his. Because he was a good person, and she loved him. But not as much as either of them deserved.

‘I’m sorry,’ Mack said, softly. ‘Was it –’ The words stuck and she cleared her throat. ‘Was it because of me?’

Raffi wasn’t sure how to answer that. ‘Yes and no.’ Her cheeks were wet, and she swiped them dry with the heel of her hand. ‘I think I’d known for a while that it was something I needed to do.’

Mack sat down beside her, close enough that their shoulders were touching, and fed another piece of wood to the fire. ‘I shouldn’t have kissed you, Raffi. It wasn’t fair.’

No. Not fair at all. Raffi had locked herself in the backstage bathroom after it happened. Her body fizzing, thrilling. Her heart in freefall.

‘You set me alight, Mack.’

The heat in her cheeks had nothing to do with the fire.

‘I thought I only liked boys, but when you kissed me, I understood that I’d been wanting it for a really long time. And I’m not sure what that means for me. For us. I feel like Neo pulled from the Matrix, and I’m still trying to figure out how deep the rabbit hole goes: whether I’m bi, or queer, or something else.’

‘I believe Macksexual is the preferred term.’

Raffi looked up to see Mack fighting a grin.

‘I’ve been freaking out,’ Raffi admitted.

‘Me too.’ Mack felt for her hand and ran her thumb across Raffi’s knuckles. ‘I thought you were angry.’

‘Not with you,’ Raffi assured her. ‘I realised I’d been lying to myself. About who I am and what I want . . . I told my parents.’

Mack’s eyes went wide. ‘How did that go?’

‘I am a plague upon their house.’ Raffi tried to look rueful – tried not to think about the scene at the dinner table three nights ago – but her vision starred, and a fresh tear slipped free before she could blink it away.

‘Fuck ’em.’

Raffi choked out a laugh, but there was no real mirth in it.

‘I mean it, Raf.’ Mack squeezed her hand. ‘If they loved you, they’d support you.’

‘Easy for you to say. Your parents practically threw you a coming out party.’

Mack rolled her eyes. ‘My parents are champagne socialists who adopted an Asian kid instead of one who looks like them so that everyone would see their altruism at a glance. They use my queerness to show off how progressive they are. I don’t give a shit about their beliefs.’

Raffi shook her head. ‘Because you can afford not to.’ She felt a rush of anger and took back her hand. Did Mack really think their family situations were comparable? That everything she was going through could be fixed by ignoring what her parents thought? ‘Coming out didn’t cost you anything, Mack.’

‘That’s not fair. I fight every day –’

‘Against who?’ Raffi demanded. ‘When you wanted to take Abby Sims as your date to the Year Ten informal, do you think the school changed the rules for you because they suddenly recognised they were stuck in the Dark Ages, or because your family’s name is on the science building? People don’t say no to you. You can be and do whatever you want. And you’re making the most of that – pushing for change, speaking up for those who can’t – it’s one of the things I love about you. But me liking girls goes against my family’s religion. It’s a sin.’

‘Says the girl who just hosted a seance,’ Mack countered. ‘You don’t even believe in God.’

While this was true, it was also beside the point.

‘Being Catholic is about more than faith, Mack. It’s the foundation of my family and how I was raised to see the world. Even if I turn my back on it, it’s always going to be part of who I am: just as I’m Italian on Dad’s side and Irish on Mum’s, I’m Catholic deep in my core.’

‘Are you saying there’s a part of you that agrees with your parents?’ Mack asked.

‘No. Of course not!’ Raffi didn’t understand how Mack could think that. ‘I’m trying to show you why this is complicated for me. Why it’s taken me a minute to make sense of what I feel for you, and why I didn’t kiss you back. I need time with this.’

Mack shook her head. ‘When I’m around you, I feel like the sky out here.’ She nodded up at the stars. ‘Like I’m all filled up with glitter. I’m proud of that feeling. Of being capable of such joy. And I love that it’s you who inspires it, Raf. If someone tried to tell me that was wrong – I’d cut them out. Why would you choose to be part of a community that vilifies you? Why would you want anything to do with people who don’t agree with who you are – who we are?’

‘They’re my family, Mack,’ she said softly. ‘They’re who I have.’

‘But they’re wrong!’ Mack blinked rapidly, her jaw tight, and Raffi realised she was trying not to cry. ‘I don’t want to be with someone who tries to justify that.’

Raffi was shocked. She wasn’t apologising for her parents – they were dinosaurs, and she’d told them as much, but she hoped that their thinking might yet evolve. ‘Mack, come on, that’s not –’

But Mack wasn’t listening. ‘You’re a coward, Raffi.’ She got up and brushed the bark from her pants. ‘Take all the time you need with that.’

Raffi watched her walk away, feeling as though she’d been stabbed. She’d known being honest with Mack would be difficult. Mack was concrete on right and wrong. And Raffi was a coward. A contradiction. If she’d had the courage to know her heart from the beginning, this whole mess might have been avoided. She stayed by the fire, the cold creeping around her as the flames shrank to embers. She’d hoped that Mack would accept her and welcome her into that warm sparkly place where being herself was something to celebrate. Instead, all she felt was scared and alone.

PRIYA

Priya stared down the dark and told herself that it was a test. A chance to redeem herself after the humiliation of sharing her ghostless ghost story and being spooked at the seance. Because in hindsight, it was obvious that Raffi was somehow responsible for ‘Smiling Jack’. She had to be. Or else it was Shelley. Jeez, Shelley. What was that girl’s deal? Priya shivered, remembering how Shelley had appeared at her side without making a sound, and she was glad she had somewhere else to stay that night. Glad she wouldn’t be sleeping with a stranger in a haunted house. She swatted the thought away. She wasn’t afraid; she just needed a breather from the bullshit.

Vodka sloshed in her otherwise-empty stomach and the ground felt soft and unsteady underfoot. She wished she hadn’t drunk or smoked so much before heading out alone. After curfew. To meet her boyfriend. If this were a horror film – if Smiling Jack were real – she’d be first on the chopping block. Pay attention, she commanded herself. That’s where the girls who ended up as knife fodder in the films went wrong: they let their guard down. And she was smarter than that. Wasn’t she?

Wait. Where was she? By her calculation, she’d been walking on the town’s main track for several minutes and should have reached the turn-off for the boys’ lodges by now, or at least been able to see the lights from the other girls’ lodges if she’d overshot. And it wasn’t that late; her classmates would still be awake, talking and playing music. Even if she couldn’t see them, she should be able to hear them. She stopped and listened. The wind breathed brine and dust and, aside from a salting of stars and her torch lighting her next few steps, the dark was absolute.

Unease bloomed in Priya’s chest and she saw again the pale, grinning face rising at Raffi’s shoulder. It occurred to her that a person could be standing on the path just ahead of her light, or crouched in the dense scrub watching her approach, and she’d never know. But that was silly. What was wrong with her tonight? There was no one out here. Smiling Jack was a prank. Sy in a mask. And to prove just how not-scared she was, Priya steeled her nerve and switched off her torch.

The dark jumped in. She held her ground.

‘Smiling Jack.’

Her voice cracked on his name and she took a beat to steady herself.

‘Smiling Jack.’

Leaves rustled, the night shifting its awareness. Shadows gathered on shadows, becoming dense. Solid. An invisible set of eyes swivelled her way and she balled her hands tighter around her torch and the vodka, ready to swing.

‘Smiling Jack.’

The wind tutted at her – silly girl – as something stepped onto the path. She sensed it moving towards her, its steps beating time with her heart’s quickening drum.

He’s not real, Priya reminded herself. It’s my imagination. I’m doing this.

The thing stopped before her. Hulk and menace. Violent heat. It was looking at her, eyes level with hers and its lips twitching towards a smile. She could almost make out the glint of its teeth and its breath was sour on her face as she jutted her chin and switched her torch back on.

The path was empty.

Of course it was. The pot had made her paranoid. Priya let out a shaky laugh and shook her head. ‘So stupid.’

Almost as soon as she started walking again she was rewarded by the sight of the path forking ahead, as though the town really had been testing her. The lights from the two hilltop lodges gazed down through the trees, and Priya doubled her pace, eager to reach them.

The hill was steeper than it had appeared in the daylight, meandering in a lazy curve that doubled the distance. But the opening chords of blink-182’s ‘Dammit’ drifted down to meet her, pepping her up, and Priya hummed along as she climbed. Baynton was no Camp Crystal Lake. Retreat was supposed to be their version of a teen-movie party scene. A chance to go a little feral and make memories they’d still be talking about at their twenty-year reunion.

‘Yesterday’s history. Tomorrow’s a mystery. Tonight’s the party,’ Priya whispered to herself, quoting the tagline from Can’t Hardly Wait.

She paused for a moment on the verandah of Jase’s lodge to reapply her lip gloss and enjoy the fact that she was sixteen years old with the whole night – her whole life – a spreading fan of possibilities before her. She could hear Jase and his friends talking over the music inside, and smell the yeasty reek of beer and boy. She scrunched her nose as she recapped her lip gloss. They really needed to ease up on the cologne. The smell grew stronger as she picked up her torch and the vodka where she’d set them down on the verandah and approached the door. There was something familiar about that scent. Something she couldn’t quite place.

Covet.

The word flashed into her mind. And before she could turn – before she had time to feel afraid – the dark had her, lifting her clear of the verandah and hauling her backwards towards the bush. Priya screamed and dropped the torch tucked beneath her arm, her feet kicking at the air.

‘Put me down! Put me down!’

The door opened, spilling light over the gravel clearing around the lodge. She saw the boys and their girlfriends backlit against the frame as they rushed outside. But she couldn’t see their faces or the thing that held her.

‘Jase! Help me!’

Her voice was more sob than scream. But Jase stood frozen on the verandah with the others, as though whatever had her was so monstrous, so terrifying they couldn’t move.

She twisted in the night’s grip and caught a glimpse of pale skin. A rictus grin. She screamed again and drove her elbow back with all her strength, fighting to free herself. Her arm connected with a solid mass. The night swore. And then she was falling. Landing heavily on something firm yet pliant. A body, she realised. A warm, living body.

Priya scrambled to her feet. She was dimly aware of people shouting and a commotion on the verandah behind her, but her focus was on her assailant lying prone in the dirt. They were dressed in dark clothes with their hoodie drawn up around a grinning skull mask, and they were massaging the spot on their chest where she’d elbowed free.

Priya didn’t know if this was the same someone who’d been creeping around the seance, but either way, she was furious. Before she knew what she was doing, she crouched by their head and yanked off the mask with enough force to snap the elastic.

Jase’s best friend Grady McGregor grinned up at her. ‘Jaaaaase! Heeeeellllp meeee!’

Priya threw the mask in the gravel beside him. ‘Fucking arsehole.’

Now that the adrenaline was burning off, she realised the sound coming from the verandah was laughter. She’d been terrified out of her wits and Jase, his friends and their girlfriends were laughing at her.

She whipped around. ‘Were you all in on this?’

‘Ooh, watch out, Jase, your girlfriend’s pissed,’ Tom Joffies teased.

‘It was a joke, Pri,’ Jase assured her. ‘We thought you’d find it funny.’

‘Yeah, we had no idea you’d scare so easily.’ Resh Sandu opened his mouth, pressed his palms to his cheeks, mimicking her fear.

‘Or that you’d full-on assault me,’ Grady added, still rubbing his chest. ‘Apology accepted, by the way.’

Heat prickled Priya’s skin. She wanted to cry. To scream a whole lot more than she had. There is nothing funny about grabbing a girl in the dark, when every girl knows that’s how she ends up murdered. Or worse. She was aware of the mood shifting, everyone becoming uneasy. Needing her to laugh along and assure them there was no harm done. Even Eleni Ledakis and Georgie Forbes, Grady and Benji Singh’s girlfriends, wouldn’t meet her eye. But the night was catching up with her. And she couldn’t stop imagining the leering face at Raffi’s shoulder. She knew now that it was just a mask, but at the time she could have sworn she’d seen its smile widen as she screamed. As though whoever – or whatever – it was had taken such pleasure in making her afraid.

‘Oh damn,’ Resh said, nudging Jase, and Priya realised she was crying.

Mortified, she turned away to wipe her eyes and a moment later strong arms closed around her, protective this time. Jase.

‘Hey, it’s okay.’ He kissed the top of her head, and she felt herself relax a little. ‘Look at me, Pri.’

She turned in his arms and he took her face in his hands, touching his forehead to hers.

‘The guys were just messing around. Be cool, yeah?’

Priya could feel the others watching her. She didn’t want to be responsible for ruining the party, or be seen as overly sensitive. Unable to take a joke. So she forced deep, calming breaths and nodded.

‘You guys are just lucky I didn’t drop the vodka!’ she said, waving the bottle she’d somehow managed to hold onto.

‘Take a guy down without spilling your drink – that’s some superwoman shit right there!’ Grady offered her his palm for a high five and Priya felt a rush of pride, having salvaged the situation.

Jase leaned in to kiss her, then scooped her up and spun her around to carry her indoors. ‘That’s my girl!’

Inside, the small living room was fuggy, the smell of beer and salt and vinegar chips competing with mildew and damp. Someone had dragged in the chairs from the kitchen and set up a CD player on the mantlepiece, and there was a Monopoly game in progress on the coffee table.

Priya arched an eyebrow at the board. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. I did not risk a ghost, Mr Wallace and being mauled by dingoes to play Monopoly.’

‘It’s Beeropoly tonight,’ Resh corrected, raising his can.

Priya rolled her eyes. ‘Of course it is.’

She made a beeline for the CD player and shuffled through the small stack of CDs. Eleni had contributed Destiny’s Child’s The Writing’s on the Wall and Priya cued up ‘Jumpin’ Jumpin” while Eleni poured vodka shots into water glasses.

‘Thank God you’re here. I was starting to think you’d piked,’ she said, clinking her glass with Priya’s.

She and Eleni weren’t exactly close, but Eleni had started dating Grady soon after Jase and Priya became official and they’d formed a kind of bond, being the only two girls who regularly attended the boys’ gatherings. Georgie, meanwhile, was new. She’d only been dating Benji for a few weeks and was perched on the couch’s armrest at his side. Priya noticed that she seemed nervous, and wondered if she found the group intimidating and if tonight would be the first time she and Benji were properly alone together. To put her at ease, she and Eleni pulled Georgie up to dance with them, swaying their hips and using their glasses as microphones while the boys finished their game.

When it was discovered that Tom and Resh were cheating, they abandoned Beeropoly for something called King’s Cup, which Grady had learned from his older brother, and invited the girls to join them.

‘The rules are simple,’ Grady explained, shuffling a deck of cards and laying it face down on the coffee table beside a clean mug. ‘Everyone needs a drink in front of them and we take turns drawing cards. Aces, we all drink. Two’s you. Three’s me. Four’s last to touch the floor. Five’s guys and six is chicks – everyone with me so far?’

Almost everyone looked confused, though to Priya it was clear: fifty-two cards in the deck meant odds were they were about to get royally fucked up.

‘I’ll clarify as we go,’ Grady assured them. ‘The kings are the important cards: pull one of the first three and you pour a shot in the centre cup. Whoever pulls the fourth king adds their shot and downs the lot.’

Priya thought it sounded juvenile. The whole point of drinking was to prove how mature you were, but the rules of drinking games always sounded as though they’d been dreamed up by six year olds.

‘Anyone sooking out?’ Grady asked, giving them each a daring eye.

‘Me,’ Georgie said. ‘I’ll be sick if I drink anymore.’

‘Your new girl’s a Cadbury!’ Tom scoffed, elbowing Benji in the ribs.

‘What about our other ladies, you switching to Milo and bickies, or are you game?’ Grady pressed.

Priya didn’t want to play, either, but Georgie backing out meant she and Eleni needed to put on a good show and, ideally, drink a few of the boys under the table. They’d never hear the end of it if they didn’t. Especially after Priya had freaked over Grady’s mask. She knew it was sort of ridiculous, but she wasn’t about to give the boys an excuse to pile on. She looked to Eleni for confirmation.

‘We’re in.’

Grady lined up their drink bottles of contraband behind the cards. ‘Pick your poison.’

The boys had finished the beer, which left Midori and Malibu – Georgie and Eleni’s offerings – Priya’s vodka and, she recoiled from the medicinal smell of the last bottle, Jägermeister. She opted for Malibu and topped it up with warm Coke. When the cards deemed it her turn to drink, she mimed big swallows, but took tiny sips. Someone changed the music to a mix CD: Less Than Jake, Fatboy Slim, The Offspring, Limp Bizkit and more blink-182. Overturned cards piled up around their cups. One, two, three drinks went into the King’s Cup. The walls spun. Time turned liquid.

Then stopped.

Everyone was looking at Priya, or, more specifically, at the card she’d slapped on the table. King number four.

‘Your chalice, milady.’ Grady offered her the mug from the centre of the table with a flourish.

The fumes coming off it made her eyes water.

Jase squeezed her hand. ‘I’ll drink it. Take one for the team?’ And then louder, for the others to hear. ‘That’s a gentleman’s beverage right there.’

She knew he was trying to give her an out. But that wasn’t how it worked. Grady, Tom, Benji and Resh looked gleeful, willing her to concede, while Eleni gave her a nod: You’ve got this.

Priya made a show of inspecting the mug’s contents and shrugged, as though finding it contained nothing more potent than tea. ‘I’m a big girl; I can handle it.’

Grady slapped his hands on the table and began to chant: ‘Here’s to Priya, she’s true blue!’

‘She’s a piss pot through and through!’ The others joined in, drumming their hands on the table and stamping their feet.

‘She’s a bastard so they say,

Tried to go to heaven but she went the other way.

Drink it down, down, down down.

Down, down, down, down!’

Their voices grew rowdier with each line, the tempo building, and when they reached a fever pitch, Priya tipped the contents of her cup into the mug, cheersed the table and swallowed the murky cocktail in one.

The room erupted with hoots and cheers.

She stood unsteadily – knowing that if she let the drink kick in, she wouldn’t be getting up at all – and spread her arms wide, welcoming their praise and closing it off with a bow.

‘Ladies, gentlemen – it’s been a pleasure.’

Jase rose after her and slipped an arm around her waist, dipping her low as she made for the door. The room freewheeled.

‘Where you off to, tiny dancer?’

His voice was gravely. Yet soft. But no, gravel couldn’t be soft, silly. Silly billy. Priya giggled, imagining little velvet rocks.

‘The guys gave me one of the single rooms for the night.’ Jase leaned in, running the tip of his nose along the edge of her ear to send a tingle down her neck. ‘You’re still cool to stay, yeah?’

Somewhere in the game Priya had forgotten the primary reason for her visit. A night alone with Jase. She turned to kiss him and got his nose instead of his lips. Tried to cover by making it seem that’s what she’d been aiming for.

‘I’m so cool. Icy cool.’ A whole blizzard of cool. Swirling. Glittering. Her thoughts splintered in fractals as he supported her down the hall and the others wolf whistled and cracked crude jokes at their departure.

Priya didn’t care. She felt proud to be with a boy as handsome and popular as Jase, and it was a relief to make it to the end of the night.

Jase kicked his exploded duffel under the bed as he led her into his room and took a pack of matches from his pocket to light the tea light candles he’d lined up along the windowsill. So romantic. Priya watched him from the bed, loving that he was making an effort to set the mood when plenty of guys wouldn’t bother. His pillow smelled of his cologne and she flipped over to nuzzle her face against it.

‘Your bed is so soft.’ The words slid on her tongue.

Her body was heavy, sleep tugging her down. A distant voice cautioned that she was smudging her make-up, and she managed to sit up and run a taming hand through her hair as the room turned a backflip. ‘Could you grab me a water, Jase?’

‘Of course,’ he said, rubbing her back. ‘Wait here.’

She took deep breaths and tried to anchor herself while he was gone. They’d been looking forward to this, and she didn’t want to ruin it.

Jase retuned with her water, switching off the main light as he came to join her on the bed, and she gulped it down.

‘Easy, tiger.’

She set the empty glass on the nightstand with a clunk and the water swilled in her stomach. For a moment she thought she might be sick, but she fought it.

‘Mint?’

‘Please,’ she said with an apologetic look. ‘I didn’t mean to get all fuzzy-headed. It’s been a weird night. We had a bonfire. The new girl got sick and someone tried to scare us . . . was that you guys?’

Jase leaned in to kiss away her question. ‘Never mind about all that. It’s just us now.’

She sank against his chest, safe in the circle of his arms. No ghosts. No drama. If he would just keep holding her, everything would steady. And in the morning, when they both had a better handle on themselves, they could take things further. But Jase was already laying her down, his hand tracing small circles on her belly, nudging up beneath her top the way she liked.

‘I love you, Priya.’

‘I love you, too.’

She tried to add that they needed to apply the brakes. Just for a bit. Until she felt better. But Jase covered her mouth with his and his touch grew more urgent. His hand travelled down, below the waistband of her jeans. And then he was helping her out of her clothes and drawing his sleeping bag over them both.

Priya closed her eyes for a second while Jase reached down to his duffel for a condom, and the dark spun her around.

‘Priya?’ His voice came from far away. ‘Priya, you good?’

‘Yeah . . . Good . . . Good as gold,’ she muttered.

But the night had swallowed her whole.

Little flames danced in the black and her thoughts were distant stars. Was she back at the bonfire? The dark was both rushing in and pulling away. Teeth glinted in the candlelight, and someone was grunting hot and close by her ear. It made her afraid.

When she opened her eyes again, Jase was rocking over her. For a panicked second she didn’t understand where she was or what was going on. The room seesawed around them and she clung to Jase, needing something solid and familiar. In another minute, he collapsed on top of her, breathing hard, and rolled over to gather her tight against his chest.

‘Hey. I lost you for a minute there. You okay?’ he asked, smoothing her hair back from her forehead.

His heart drummed beneath her cheek.

She nodded. Her thoughts were still swimmy and she barely registered what he was saying.

‘You need more water?’

‘Yeah, but I’ll get it,’ she told him, wriggling out of his arms and fumbling for her clothes, grateful for the excuse to get some air.

The others had gone to bed, or at least to their rooms, but they’d left the hall light on and Priya felt exposed as she staggered to the kitchen with her empty glass. The levels were all wrong in her head, shifting from bright to dim, quiet to loud. Nothing was sitting right. Had Jase really kept going when she blacked out? And had he known what he was doing? Is that what he meant when he asked whether she was okay? She wished she were back home, sober in her bed, with all her things neatly arranged around her.

Her throat ached with a sob and her eyes grew hot.

‘Shit,’ she muttered to the dark. ‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’

Jase was asleep when she returned to his room. His humped shape beneath the sleeping bag seemed somehow unfamiliar and the thought of lying beside him made her squirm. She didn’t think she could bear it if he asked her what was wrong. She wasn’t sure she could put it into words, even if she wanted to. Instead, she slipped on her shoes and tiptoed back through the quiet house, driven by a sudden need to be with her friends.

MACK

After the way things ended with Raffi, Mack was tempted to crawl into bed and stay there for the rest of Retreat. But she felt grimy. Dust and ash clogged her pores and she needed to wash the night from her skin. The shower spurted brown gunk before slowing to a clear trickle and she sank to sit in the tub beneath the tepid stream. She didn’t understand how Raffi could defend her parents and their stone-age beliefs and, in the moment, walking away had seemed the right thing to do. But when she’d looked back through the mudroom door and seen Raffi in the dying firelight, hugging her knees to her chest against the vast expanse of dark, being right had felt all kinds of wrong.

At least Shelley hadn’t witnessed their fight. Her door had been shut when Mack passed, but she’d left a stem of the grevillea that grew in the pots by the front door on Mack’s pillow. Mack supposed she was trying to be friendly, but it struck her as an odd, intimate gesture, and the blood-dark petals against the white pillow slip had given her a sick feeling. She blamed the lodge. Ghost stories aside, there was something off about Overseer’s. About Baynton. Everything felt brittle and treacherous, deepening the divide between them.

Mack squeezed her eyes shut and lifted her face to the water so that her tears were lost in the flow. She hated that Raffi had been taught to deny herself. To reject what she felt for Mack with such force, that she couldn’t recognise it as love. It was cruel. And unfair. And she wished she could make the Vecchios understand how much needless hurt they were inflicting.

Of course, Raffi’s parents knew Mack was gay, and they’d never made an issue of it. In fact, they went out of their way to avoid acknowledging it, in much the same way they never looked in the top drawer of Raffi’s older sisters’ nightstands where they kept their contraceptive pills. But Mack knew Raffi was required to keep the door open when they hung out in her room, and that her parents only agreed to sleepovers if Priya was included. As a consequence, she always felt tolerated rather than welcomed. She would almost have preferred it if they forbade her from visiting. At least she could call them out on that. Force a conversation. Their silent disapproval was harder to untangle, and seemed to imply that being gay was fine, perhaps, for secular folk. But it was unacceptable to them. And unacceptable for their daughter.

She touched the beads of the rainbow pride bracelet Raffi had made her as a coming out gift. Because I love that you wear your heart on your sleeve, Raffi had said when she’d knotted it around Mack’s wrist. And if anyone gives you shit about it, I’ll summon a legion of demons to torment them for all eternity.

The bracelet had become so much a part of her, Mack almost didn’t see it anymore. But its slight, reassuring weight had given her courage when she came out to her parents, and Priya, and all their other friends. It made it that little bit easier to push for same-sex relationships to be covered in the school’s sex-ed program (even if the school had pushed back on that one) and to put loud-mouthed dipshits like Kyle Lynton in their place. In fact, it made it easier for Mack to be herself because she knew she had Raffi in her corner, ready to rain hell on anyone who tried to shame her.

She played over their fight again. Even though Raffi had been quoting her parents, it had hurt – a kill shot straight to the heart – when she said that being queer was a sin. It wasn’t the first time Mack had heard it, of course. It was implied in almost every book, film and music video where all the couples were straight, and male characters were careful not to get too close to one another, or appear too soft, for fear of being called a fag. There were so few stories for her, and no dating advice columns in her favourite teen magazines. The only girl-on-girl kiss she’d seen on screen was between Sarah Michelle Gellar and Selma Blair in Cruel Intentions, and the film made it abundantly clear that it was a one-time thing – a thrill for all the horny boys playing along at home – while the gay footballer had his sexuality used against him in a cruel bit of blackmail. But no one she cared about had ever told her to her face that she was put together wrong. Was that what Raffi meant when she said coming out hadn’t cost her anything?

Mack’s parents had always said that it didn’t matter who you loved so long as you cared for each other, but it’d still been weird and awkward to have a formal conversation with them about sex and who she was attracted to. She tried to imagine how much worse it might have been if they mistakenly believed that she was fatally flawed, or that she lacked the fortitude to resist temptation and was choosing to put her soul at risk. Mack felt sick. This, she realised, with a sinking feeling, is what Raffi had been trying to explain. Her whole life Raffi had been told, by people she loved and depended on, that being queer was a moral failing. There were no safe spaces for her. Perhaps not even within herself.

Mack had kissed Raffi because when she was around her, all the colours were dialled up to eleven, and she wanted to share that feeling with the person who inspired it. She hadn’t stopped to consider how, with that kiss, she was not only asking Raffi to choose her but to turn her back on Sy, her faith and her family. It was huge, and Raffi had done it. Realising Raffi wanted to be with her was the single greatest moment of Mack’s life. But then, what had Mack offered in return?

She’d called Raffi a coward.

Told her it was not enough.

And stormed off in a huff to feel sorry for herself.

‘The hell is wrong with you, Whitmore?’

She needed to fix this. Apologise. And make sure Raffi knew that she was there for her, no matter what else they might be or become to each other. But as she pulled herself to stand, she saw the top of the bathroom door ease open and a shadow fall across the shower curtain.

‘Bathroom’s occupied,’ she said, assuming it was Shelley come to use the toilet.

The shape on the other side of the curtain didn’t move.

‘Hey, a little privacy? I’ll be out in a minute.’

Mack turned off the water and listened. Whoever was in there with her was keeping perfectly silent and still. But there was definitely someone else in the bathroom; the shower curtain was moving with their breath. Mack felt a twinge of unease.

‘Shelley? Raffi?’

But the figure was too tall, too broad to be one of her lodgemates. And whoever it was, they were standing very close. If she opened the curtain, they’d be looking down on her. Maybe Priya had told Jase and his friends about the seance, and they’d had the boneheaded idea to sneak down to Overseer’s and scare them. Pay back Raffi for making Priya scream. God, she was not in the mood for their bullshit tonight.

‘Grady? Resh?’ They seemed the most likely candidates. ‘If there’s a boy out there, you’ll be suspended for this.’

The figure shook its head. Not Grady. Not Resh.

Mack hated guessing games. She wasn’t sure who – if anyone – had been messing with them at the fire. Or who might be creeping on her now. But she did know who they were pretending to be.

A chill went through her as she stared at the shape.

‘. . . Smiling Jack?’

The figure slowly lifted its hand in a wave and the ripple in the curtain made claws of its fingers.

Mack fought to keep her voice steady. ‘Very funny, perv.’

The figure lowered its hand. She sensed it smiling. There was something confident and menacing about its stance, a solidity. Jase and his friends might pull faces at the windows, or maybe, at a stretch, sneak inside to hide behind a door or under a bed and jumpscare them. But coming into the bathroom, while she was showering? And naked? That seemed too much, even for them. Besides, tonight was a rare chance to cosy up, unsupervised, with their girlfriends. Odds were, they were already in bed. Her thoughts skittered back to the man – if it was a man – that she’d seen on the fire track. He’d waved at her, too. Just as Smiling Jack had waved at the girl in Raffi’s story.

Fear prickled along her spine and she reached for her towel hanging from the rack at the end of the bath. The figure stayed where it was. Watching. Waiting. Knowing she’d have to come out at some point. And close enough to grab her when she did.

‘Go away,’ she whispered.

And when it still didn’t move, she tried again, squeezing her eyes shut like a little kid trying to disappear the bogeyman. ‘Go away. Go away! GO AWAY!’

In a burst of fear and fury, she opened her eyes and yanked back the curtain.

Something swung in her periphery – the door latching shut or the curtain flapping as she shoved it aside. Steam curled towards the ceiling and wind chittered the frosted window glass sitting loose in its frame. But the bathroom was empty.

Mack quickly gathered her clothes and toiletries, wanting to get back to her room and put the incident behind her. It had to be the pot, right? She’d only had a few puffs, but maybe that was enough? Given she’d also had those nips of vodka, and her heart was ping-ponging around her chest? And they’d been calling on ghosts. Priming themselves – that’s what Raffi said. That made sense. In fact, given the circumstances, it’d almost be weirder if she didn’t imagine something.

She’d left the mudroom and hall lights on to find her way back to her room after her shower, but now the house was dark. Just as it had been for Ms Lim when she encountered the ghost. Mack pushed the thought aside. Looking out through the back door window, she saw the fire had burned to embers. Raffi was no longer sitting on the log, and the door to her room was closed, rimmed with a faint glow. She must have switched off the lights when she went to bed, not realising Mack was still in the bathroom. Or else meant it as a quiet ‘fuck you’.

Mack checked the kitchen and living room, feeling both silly and scared as she looked behind the doors and in the cupboards to be one hundred per cent for sure certain there was no one else in the house. Which there wasn’t. Never had been. Remembering the broken lock, she pushed one of the living room couches across the front door and looked in on Shelley. Tapping softly at her door, Mack opened it just wide enough to see Shelley’s humped shape in the bed, her hair matted across her pillow and her face turned to the wall. Back in her room, Mack did a locker-room change from towel to PJs without showing any skin. Which was totally unnecessary. Because there was nobody watching. Nobody there.

She was shimming her tank top over her towel and her heart rate had almost settled when a sharp knock at the door made her squeak and stumble-crash into the bed. She tried to salvage her dignity by taking a seat on the mattress, like that had been her intention, and looked around to see Raffi hovering by the door.

‘Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you. This time.’

Raffi had changed into a thrifted vintage nightie with a scooped neckline and ruffles at the hem and an oversized, velvety dressing-gown – also thrifted – that was slipping off one shoulder. On anyone else, the ensemble would have been ridiculous, but with her hair dishevelled by the wind and the fire’s heat still in her cheeks, Raffi was a Gothic-romance cover girl.

‘Shit, Raf, you look . . .’ Mack reached for the right word: Resplendent? Radiant? Ravishing? ‘Um . . . Wow . . .’

Shakespeare indeed.

Raffi chewed her lip, as though still worried Mack might bite her head off.

‘Is this from you?’

Mack saw she was holding a stem of grevillea, a twin to the one still resting on her pillow, and shook her head. ‘I reckon they’re from Shelley. Her way of making amends, I guess.’

The flower drooped in Raffi’s grip. ‘Oh, I thought – never mind.’ She forced a smile. ‘That was sweet of her.’

Mack was still reeling from whatever it was she’d experienced in the shower, and from the sight of Raffi done up in ruffles and velvet in her doorway. It took a moment for her mind to catch up and consider why Raffi might be so overdressed for bed.

‘Did you want it to be from me?’

‘No,’ Raffi said, a flush creeping up her neck. ‘I mean, yes, but it doesn’t matter.’

Shit. This was Mack’s chance to make things right and she couldn’t mess up again, but Raffi was already turning back towards her room.

‘Raffi, wait.’

‘It’s late, Mack.’

I’m sorry, she wanted to say. You opened up to me and I stuck a blade in – I don’t know what I was thinking. But the words jumbled in her chest. She wasn’t used to asking for forgiveness. Instead, she found herself changing the topic: ‘Did you come into the bathroom when I was in there before?’

‘No.’ Raffi crossed her arms over her chest, wary but interested. ‘Why?’

‘It’s probably nothing. But I thought I saw something,’ Mack said. ‘Someone standing on the other side of the curtain while I was in the shower.’

It sounded even more far-fetched when she said it aloud.

‘Psycho,’ Raffi muttered.

Mack flinched. Yes, she was chickening out of the conversation that needed to be had and probably deserved whatever names Raffi chose to call her, but it still stung.

‘The Hitchcock movie,’ Raffi clarified. ‘Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh? The infamous shower scene –?’ She closed her fist around an invisible knife hilt and stabbed the air. ‘Eek! Eek! Eek! Eek!’

Mack had no idea what she was referring to.

Raffi shook her head, smiling, just a little. ‘You have Final Girl ignorance when it comes to horror. Could it have been Shelley?’

‘She’s asleep,’ Mack said, relieved that Raffi was curious enough to still be talking to her. ‘I checked, and it didn’t seem like she was faking.’

‘Weird.’

‘Yeah. Raf, that story you told, about Smiling Jack – it was fiction, right?’

Raffi licked her lips. ‘Pretty much.’

‘Pretty much?’

‘He’s a Saints legend, Mack. People see him every year.’ Raffi put the ‘see’ in air quotes. ‘There are a bunch of stories, but they’re not real.’

‘How do you know?’ Mack pressed.

‘Because they’re always rip-offs of classic camp-fire ghost stories like “The Licked Hand” or “Johnny, I Want My Liver Back!”.’

Mack stared at her blankly.

‘I’ll give you an example. You know Jess Eacott who played the lead in Cabaret last year? Well, one of the girls in her older sister’s year stayed in Overseer’s and claimed she was woken by something moving around on the roof. At first she figured it was a possum. But it sounded heavy. Like a man walking on the tin. The noise eventually stopped and she went back to sleep. She was then woken a second time by a soft tapping. When her eyes adjusted, she saw a pair of legs hanging down in front of the window, as though someone was sitting on the edge of the roof. Remember, it was dark, she could only sort of see. But she was certain the sound was the heel of a boot knocking against the glass, like whoever was up there was trying to get her attention. And once they did, a hand slowly lowered, holding a woman’s severed head by the hair, her mouth open in a scream and her eyes cut out.’

‘The fuck?’ Mack said, cutting a glance at the window. ‘That happened here?’

‘In this very room,’ Raffi said, her voice ominous, but she backtracked quickly when she saw Mack’s expression. ‘It was a prank,’ she assured her. ‘The head was a mask. One of the boys owned up to it. Or the girl invented the whole thing – the details are fuzzy. That’s how these stories work. They always happen to a friend of a friend, never someone you know. And there are no reliable witnesses. No way to verify what happened. That particular story is a slapdash reworking of the Hookman legend.’ She waggled her eyebrows. ‘But it’s creepy, right?’

‘Dead creepy,’ Mack agreed, pulling her feet up from the floor to sit cross-legged on the bed. In case there was something under there. God, she was pathetic.

‘Why don’t I know these stories, if people tell them every year?’

Raffi shrugged. ‘Because ghost stories are murky, Mack. They’re not really your thing.’

It felt like an accusation. But it was true: it terrified her to imagine improbable horrors creeping through life’s little cracks. Because how do you defend yourself against monsters you can’t name? How do you live with that uncertainty?

‘I should . . .’ Raffi motioned towards her room.

‘Stay.’ Mack looked up at her, imploring. ‘Please? I hate how we left things.’

Raffi shook her head. ‘I can’t go another round on that tonight, Mack.’

‘Let me apologise, at least?’

Raffi tugged up her dressing-gown and pulled it tight around her. Velvet armour. But she didn’t leave. ‘The Mackenzie Whitmore I know doesn’t do apologies.’

Mack made a face. ‘Who is this person? She sounds insufferable.’

Raffi raised an eyebrow. Doesn’t she just?

Mack fiddled with her bracelet as she tried to find the words she needed. ‘You’re not a coward, Raf. You’re the bravest person I know. And you were right when you said things have been easier for me. Some of that’s my family’s money, and my parents being supportive. But mostly it’s because I have you.’ She made herself meet Raffi’s eye. ‘You make me bold.’

A little of the wariness softened from Raffi’s expression, but she still had her arms crossed. ‘Keep grovelling.’

‘Are you enjoying this?’

‘Immensely.’ Raffi motioned for her to continue and Mack knew they’d be able to fix this, but she still needed Raffi to hear the most important part.

‘I’m really sorry, Raf. I didn’t mean to blow up your life and leave you to deal with the fallout. This past week must have been awful and I’m sorry you had to go through it alone. I should have been there for you.’

‘I’m sorry, too, Mack,’ Raffi said quietly, coming to sit beside her. ‘I wish I’d understood from the beginning that what I felt for you was more than friendship. I’ve been sending you mixed signals, and that wasn’t fair.’

Mack dared to shift a little closer so that her bare arm brushed against the velvet of Raffi’s dressing-gown. ‘Raf, you don’t need to have everything figured out, or put a clear label on your heart for us to work.’ She took Raffi’s hand. ‘I understand that this is new for you but, if it’s still something you want, we can explore it together.’

Raffi nodded and bit her lip. ‘I’d like that.’

Mack felt Raffi’s hand trembling in hers and leaned in until their lips were almost touching. ‘Are you scared, Raffi Vecchio?’

‘Not with you,’ Raffi whispered and closed the distance between them.

Her kiss felt like a question: Is this okay? Am I doing it right? In reply, Mack let go of Raffi’s hand to wrap her arm around her waist and kiss her long and slow. She thrilled to feel Raffi’s lips curving into a smile at her touch, and dared to go a little lower, kissing the fine bone of her jaw. Her neck. She heard Raffi’s breath catch in her throat and felt her pulse quicken beneath her lips. Mack’s whole body was pins and needles. Every cell sparking, and she wished she’d packed something more romantic than her fluffy cloud pyjamas as she pressed her lips close by Raffi’s ear.

‘Let me show you what we can be.’

PRIYA

Priya shivered in the sudden cold as she eased the boys’ front door closed behind her. The night sloshed and lurched. Everything was upside-down and turned around, and her thoughts tumbled towards Overseer’s Lodge. Towards her friends. She wished she was already back with them. Or, better yet, that she’d never left.

It took her three tries to switch on her torch. She managed to get the beam pointed at the path and began making her way down the hill, but the swimmy feeling in her head grew worse as she walked. She checked her watch – one am. Anxiety hour. The wind howled in off the distant sea, and the dark was thick and present. She shouldn’t be out here on her own. She needed to sit down. Sober up. The ground tilted to meet her, gritty leaf litter breaking her fall, and she heaved a watery cocktail of King’s Cup and stomach juices into the grassy undergrowth.

‘Class act, P,’ she muttered, wiping her mouth.

She was not this messy, trash-bag girl who drank too much and starfished on her boyfriend the moment they were alone. She was smart – not know-it-all, nagging smart like Mack, who couldn’t make it through lunch without cantering in on her high horse to remind everyone that meat was murder and their Burger Rings and Twisties packets were hastening the apocalypse – but cool-girl smart. Up for a party. And cool-smart party girls stayed in control. They made good choices.

Exhibit A: Jase. As well as being the highest-scoring player on the Saints’ A-grade footy team, he volunteered at his local surf club, was part of the school mentoring program and had been voted house captain for next year. He was loyal. He played Nintendo with her little brother on the weekends, slipped chocolate hearts into her lunchbox and came over every Tuesday night to watch Dawson’s Creek with her, even though his mates gave him shit about it.

Jase was a smart, solid choice. She loved him. Loved being with him. And she’d wanted to have sex that night. Of course she had. It was the whole reason she’d gone to his lodge. So what if they were a little drunk? The ground rocked as she stood up. Okay, fine, a lot drunk. If she wasn’t into it, she should have said something. He wasn’t a mind-reader. She couldn’t blame him for not reading her thoughts. But he didn’t check in with you either, a voice that sounded a lot like Mack’s pointed out. You blacked out, and he kept going. Priya shook her head to clear it. Jase loved her. He would never knowingly hurt her or – or –

She couldn’t bring herself to think the word for it. If she allowed herself to think that word, everything changed. She changed. That word was violent. Victimising. And it’s not as though he’d roofied her at a party and dragged her into the bushes to have his way with her against her will. This was not that. If she made an issue out of it, it would ruin what they had. Ruin her. People would say she was attention-seeking. Vindictive. Out to dim his bright future. She didn’t want any of that. She just needed him to be the kind of boyfriend who understood that sex was supposed to be something they enjoyed together. Something Jase did with her, not to her for his own pleasure.

Priya swept the beam of her torch from side to side, scanning for ankle-turning rocks, and concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other. She guessed the walk to Jase’s had taken less than ten minutes. The way back, being downhill, should be faster. Five minutes, tops. Though it seemed to be taking an age. The trees grew thicker and taller here than in the main part of town, and their white branches overlapped; a fence of crooked bones bordering the path. She shivered at the image. Then stopped.

There was a man standing to the side of the path up ahead, maybe ten steps away.

But no. That couldn’t be right. Could it?

She swung her torch back to the place.

Yes.

Oh God.

He was dressed all in black with his lower half hidden in the scrub and stood facing the path with his head down. His dark hair hung to his shoulders, obscuring his face, but he appeared to be a white, adult male. He seemed unaware of her and was holding very still. So still, he would be easy to miss. If she hadn’t caught him with her torch, she might have walked right past without knowing he was there. It was a disturbing thought.

She swallowed hard.

‘Hi . . .?’

The man seemed not to hear.

‘Hey, excuse me!’ she tried louder, even though he was close enough to have heard her the first time. ‘Who are you? What are you doing out here?’ Without a light. In the middle of the night.

The man kept his head down, his arms hanging limply at his sides, almost as though he were asleep. It gave Priya a bad feeling. She glanced back to the lights of Jase’s lodge. She didn’t want to go back there, but she didn’t want to get closer to the man either.

‘Dude, you’re freaking me out.’ Her voice broke, and she covered it with a laugh. ‘Can you seriously not hear me?’

No response.

She reached down for a pebble. Lobbed it not at him, but close enough to get his attention.

He didn’t flinch.

‘The fuck . . .?’

You’re a smart girl, Priya. Go back to Jase, her inner voice cautioned. She imagined tucking in beside him and his hot, heavy arm coming around her. Pinning her close. She couldn’t do it. Not tonight.

‘Look, I don’t know what this is, but I need to get home. I’m going to walk past and you’re going to stay where you are, okay?’

The man ignored her.

Okay. She could do this. She could run if she had to, even in her state.

She took a tentative step forward, her torch fixed on the man so she’d see if he moved. But he remained so still, he didn’t appear to be breathing.

Okay, okay. Two more steps.

Three.

Four.

Sidney Prescott-ing up the stairs when she should be running out the front door. But what choice did she have? She was on the opposite edge of the path now, giving the man a wide berth as she approached. His stillness gave her hope that she was misreading the situation. As though her perspective might shift, just a little, with her next step, or the one after that, and the man would reveal himself to be a charred tree stump or the crumbled remains of an old wall – some relic left by the miners, that, from certain angles, took on human form.

But no.

Each step brought him into sharper focus.

His eyes were open and too dark, seemingly sunk in overlarge sockets, and his skin was too pale. Corpse white and powdery.

The fuck? The fuck?

Priya’s heart pulsed a staccato 80s synth beat as she drew level with the man.

Don’t look at him. Don’t look –

Something twitched at the corner of her eye.

The man was watching her.

Smiling at her.

And – oh shit – she knew that face.

That awful, mocking leer.

And it was not a mask. Not Grady McGregor playing tricks.

Run.

RUN.

Her muscles were screaming. She was screaming, charging down the hill, ears pricked for the sound of pursuit and her body braced for the scything arm swinging down to hook her into the forever dark. But there was only her own rasping breath, her siren heart, her single set of skidding steps.

Where was he? Where the fuck was he?

Just keep moving, her inner voice cautioned. Stay on the path and don’t stop running until you’re safely home.

This time she was listening. All ears. She didn’t know what rules the man – Call him what he is: Smiling Jack – played by, but she wasn’t sticking around to find out. Curiosity got you chainsaw massacred. Gutted like a fish. She was smarter than that.

The light from her torch kicked up and back as she pumped her arms. Her legs were pistons. The fork in the path had to be coming up. Any second now. And yes, there it was. Skid. Hard left. Back on the town’s main track. She tried to keep her torch anchored on the path. Did not need to see the wild shadows crouched against the ruins. Her throat was raw from when she’d been sick and her lungs were on fire. Every muscle burning. She gritted her teeth against the pain. Keep going, she commanded herself. Just keep going.

There was the turn-off to Overseer’s. She was almost there. Almost safe. Except – oh shit – a gate appeared out of the dark in front of her as she rounded the corner. She crashed hard against it, crying out as the metal top bar caught her full in the chest. The force of the impact knocked her off balance and she landed, wheezing and disoriented, in the dirt. There was a sign on the gate, but the letters were blurry and difficult to read. Shit. She’d lost a contact lens. Shit. Shit. Shit. Her mum was going to kill her. If she survived that long.

She reached out a shaking hand and curled her fingers around the links in the gate’s wire, pulling herself to stand. In her panic, she must have come too far and taken the wrong turn-off. She cursed her drunken, fear-addled stupidity and turned her torch back the way she’d come. There was no sign of Smiling Jack but he must have heard her scream. He knew exactly where she was.

Fuck.

There was nothing for it but to retrace her steps. Her hand was shaking and the torchlight jittered on the bend in the path ahead where the scrub grew thick enough to obscure her view of the main track. That’s where he’s waiting for you. She pictured him standing on the path just out of sight, his Cheshire cat grin glinting like a blade in the dark.

You’re a fighter. You can do this, she told herself.

She gripped her torch in both hands as though it were a bat and forced herself to move forward, edging closer to the bend in the path.

A twig snapped in the scrub behind her.

She stopped and swung her torch around, aiming at the place, but the scrub was too dense for the light to penetrate. A wallaby or a possum, maybe. It couldn’t be the man – she would have heard him before now if he was that close and moving through the bush.

Not if he’s a ghost.

‘Ghosts can’t hurt you,’ she whispered aloud, and then raised her voice, challenging the dark. ‘They’re not real.’

They’re trauma. That’s what Raffi had said. Priya had had a bad experience and seeing Smiling Jack was her drunken way of processing. Or something. That made sense. Or Raffi would make it make sense, when Priya told her, back at the lodge.

The thought gave her courage and, moving slowly, cautiously, she peered around the bend. A sob hiccupped in her throat: the main track was clear and when she shut her blurred eye, she could see the turn-off to Overseer’s, not more than thirty metres away. She felt sick and sore and her limbs were jellied with fright, barely capable of supporting her weight. But she could do this. On the count of three, she’d make a dash for it.

One . . .

Two . . .

A second twig snapped behind her. Much closer, this time. Priya froze. Whatever it was sounded too large to be an animal.

Don’t look. Just get home.

She commanded her body to run. Run. Run. Her torch swung in dizzying arcs as she moved. The night was a blur. It felt as though the bush were rearranging itself around her and, even with just her good eye open, she struggled to keep sight of the turn-off. She slowed for a fraction of a second to orient herself and, as she did, there came a great whooshing from somewhere above and behind her, accompanied by a monumental force swooping down. Before she could turn, or launch herself clear of its path, something hard and heavy slammed between her shoulder blades, sending her sprawling.

Gypsum bit into her knees and palms as she hit the ground. She landed awkwardly, one arm twisted beneath her. Pain pulsed through her limbs from the impact. She couldn’t move – couldn’t pull air into her lungs. Her torch clattered away, beyond her reach, the beam blinking out. Her eyes grew hot as she realised this wasn’t a joke or a dark twist of her imagination. Jase’s friends could be dicks, but they drew a line at physical abuse. Even Kyle Lynton wouldn’t punch a girl in the back. At least, she was pretty sure he wouldn’t. Besides, whatever hit her had more strength than the fittest high school footy players; something out here meant her real harm.

She tried to get up on all fours, but her wrist buckled beneath her weight and a pleading no, no, no! came from her throat as she dragged herself forward, her shaking hands feeling for her torch. A disturbance of air brushed past her face. Whatever had hit her was still there, moving in a slow circle around her.

‘Who are you?’ she choked. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

A silent, smiling reply beamed all around.

Her fingers fumbled over something smooth and firm. A rock, or the toe of a steelcapped boot, before closing around the torch. She scuttled back, clutching the torch and mashing the switch. The beam stuttered to life and she cast it in a frantic circle. There was no one. No sign of Smiling Jack. Adrenaline thrummed in her ears, and with that desperate, surging strength, she pushed herself to stand. To run. Each step sent fresh pain spiking through her grazed knees. But the path to Overseer’s was just ahead – so close – and she forced herself to keep going, placing one foot in front of the other.

Make the turn.

See the lights.

And there was the reason she’d missed them the first time: a spreading gum hid the way. What felt like leaves from a low hanging branch brushed the top of her head as she passed below, jolting her. Instinct swung her around to see the man – Smiling Jack – whatever the fuck he was, dropping from the branch to land in an insectile crouch.

No. No. No.

His face floated on the dark in the flickering torchlight, limbs twisting at wrong angles and his smile widening as he came at her on all fours.

‘Fire!’ she rasped, still fighting to breathe. ‘FIRE!’

Because smart girls know better than to call for help. That only scares people away. But it was okay. She was okay. Because she was running, sprinting. The lodge’s front bedroom light was a beacon holding her steady, and she was almost there.

Almost to the door.

Almost safe.

Almost.

RAFFI

Someone was screaming: a distant, nightmare sound jolting Raffi awake. She pushed up onto her elbows, heart rabbiting, trying to locate the source. The room was unfamiliar. Dim light from the bedside lamp showed flaking lime-washed walls, industrial carpet and a small window with burgundy trim. There was a damp, musty smell, undercut by the sweeter notes of CK One. Raffi smiled as the night came back to her and she touched the hand resting on her waist. Mack. She was with Mack.

She looked down at Mack’s sleeping face. Her dark hair spilled across the pillow and her bare shoulders were goose-pimpled with cold above the sleeping bag they’d unzipped to make a blanket large enough for two. Raffi’s heart clenched. A hundred sleepovers and they’d finally figured out how to share a bed. She wanted to wake Mack so she could warm her chilled skin and kiss her again. To make up for all those nights she’d turned her back on the growing feelings between them. She reached to smooth Mack’s hair from her ear and whisper her name, but was stopped by a sudden thud in the living room.

Mack didn’t stir. She slept like the dead.

The sound came again, louder this time and accompanied by an awful, gasping wheeze.

‘Raffiiiiiii . . .’

Raffi’s pulse kicked up. She’d dismissed the scream she’d heard as a glitch in her dreaming brain. Now she was out of bed, snatching up her dressing-gown and stumbling for the living room on sleep-clumsy feet. She turned on the light to see that either Mack or Shelley had pushed one of the couches against the door, and someone was on the other side trying to force their way in.

‘Who’s there?’ she asked, keeping her voice calm as she scanned the room for something to use as a weapon.

The doorhandle rattled and the thumping came again, this time with enough force to shift the couch and open a small gap between the door and its frame. Raffi spied a dusty golf umbrella in the corner, left by a previous guest. It wasn’t much, but she picked it up and aimed it towards the door as she approached, hovering her finger over the release.

‘You’re going to have to work a lot harder if you want to scare me, arsehole.’

‘Heeeellllp!’ A brown, bloodied hand forced its way through the gap. ‘Let me in!’

Raffi knew that hand. She recognised the chipped glitter nail polish.

‘Priya?’ She dropped the umbrella and hurried to pull the couch away from the door.

Priya half-stumbled, half-fell inside, clutching her wrist. Her make-up was smudged and her clothes were filthy. Raffi had never seen her so afraid.

‘What happened? What’s wrong?’

Priya didn’t seem to hear her. ‘Shut it! Shut the door!’

She pushed past Raffi in a blind panic, trying to shift the couch back against the door, but she was still clutching her wrist as though it were injured and couldn’t manage. Raffi took over, putting her weight behind the couch as Priya scuttled clear and collapsed against the far wall, hugging herself tight.

‘He’s coming for us, Raffi,’ she sobbed.

‘Who?’ Raffi felt whiplashed, her brain struggling with the snap transition from sleepy bliss to . . . whatever this was. ‘What’s going on, Pri?’

But Priya was crying too hard to make words, her tears tracking mascara through the dust on her cheeks. Her hands were grazed and stuck with gravel and an ugly cut oozed through the torn knee of her new jeans.

‘Did you fall? Are you hurt?’

Priya’s breath came in shallow, panicked sobs and her eyes were still fixed terror-wide on the door, as though expecting someone to Rambo through it. ‘He-he ch-chased me and kn-knocked m-me down. H-he heard us, Raffi. He heard us.’

‘Hold up. Rewind.’ Raffi crouched in front of Priya and put her hands on her shoulders to steady her. ‘Jase hit you?’

Raffi struggled to understand what Priya saw in Jase, though she’d never thought of him as violent. In fact, she and Mack privately referred to him as the Labrador, on account of his being a placid, pampered idiot whose chief joys in life were chasing a football and being petted by Priya. It was hard to imagine him getting angry, let alone punchy.

But Priya was shaking her head: not him.

‘Then who? Who did this?’

Priya hugged herself tighter as her body spasmed with new fear and her mouth twisted into a grimace.

‘S-s-smiling J-jack.’

Raffi stared at her, caught off guard. ‘You saw the ghost?’

Priya nodded, miserable.

But she couldn’t have seen him. Because Smiling Jack wasn’t real. Raffi felt her senses sharpening as her survival instincts powered up. Something was wrong here – a bad actor at play, turning her ghost story into something more sinister. ‘And he followed you?’ she pressed. ‘He’s outside?’

Priya nodded again.

‘Wait here.’ Raffi looked to the door as she stood.

‘Don’t!’

Priya reached out to stop her, but Raffi had already crossed the room and was dragging the couch clear of the door a second time. Pulling her hair at the bonfire was one thing. She could understand why someone would do that for a laugh. But creeping on Mack in the shower and assaulting Priya in the dark? That was fucked up.

‘Please, Raf. It’s not safe.’

The fear in Priya’s voice gave Raffi pause.

Raffi knew she’d made up the story she’d told at the fire. She must have. It wasn’t unusual for her to lose herself in her work, or for her characters to take over. But her twist on the Smiling Jack legend had almost seemed to come from the park itself. A horror whispered on the wind. And impossible as Raffi knew it to be, a small part of her still wondered: What if . . .? What if . . .? What if . . .?

The thought made her heart race as she opened the door and stepped into the dark.

‘Hello? Is someone out here?’

There was no reply. She didn’t really expect one.

Priya’s torch lay at Raffi’s feet, casting a flickering beam of light across the verandah. Raffi bent to pick it up and shone the beam over the clearing. She frowned. There was something on the steps. Moving closer, she saw a white face leering up at her with a wicked grin. No, not a face – a mask. Her heart sank a little as she scooped it up. It was a cheap, plastic thing. Unconvincing, even in the dark, and she was surprised Priya had fallen for it.

‘Raffi? You okay?’ Priya whispered from inside the door.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, heading back up the stairs to rejoin Priya in the living room. ‘And I found our ghost.’ She held up the mask by its broken elastic. ‘You got Scooby-doo’d, Pri.’

Priya stared at it in disbelief. ‘Grady . . .?’

Grady McGregor. That made sense. But Priya was shaking her head. ‘It’s Grady’s mask, but that’s not what I saw. It was bigger. Its eyes were wrong and it didn’t move like anything human. Smiling Jack is real. We need to wake the others. Make the circle, finish the ritual –’ Her eyes were pleading, desperate. ‘We have to send him back.’

Raffi took a closer look at her friend, her thoughts sharpening, catching up with the situation. She’d put Priya’s unsteadiness down to fear, but watching her try to pull herself up, only for her legs to give way, Raffi realised Priya was also drunk. Way drunker than she’d been at the bonfire. She crouched and rubbed soothing circles on Priya’s back. At close range she smelled of sick and there was vomit flecked in her hair. Priya would be mortified when she sobered up.

‘Listen to me, Pri. Whatever you saw out there, you’re safe now, okay? The lodge is safe. Nothing’s coming in here.’

‘Do you promise?’ Priya looked up at her with wide eyes, and Raffi saw that her irises were different colours. No wonder she’d mistaken a mask for the real thing – she was missing a contact lens.

‘Cross my heart. There’s a first-aid kit in the kitchen. Let’s get you cleaned up. Then we’ll figure out what to do about the ghost.’

Priya allowed Raffi to help her up and steer her towards the hall, but she kept looking back towards the door.

‘He was right there, Raf. Right behind me.’

Raffi guided Priya down to the kitchen and got her settled in a chair with a glass of water, then set to work tweezing the gravel from her cuts and dabbing Dettol on the grazes. She didn’t know what Grady had done exactly – whether he’d scared Priya so badly that she’d fallen in her haste to get away, or if he really had knocked her down – but it seemed certain he’d been out to frighten Priya. She felt a rush of anger. Why did boys like Grady feel the need to intrude where they weren’t invited and put themselves at the centre of things? What gave them the right? And what made Grady think it was okay to leave Priya alone and vulnerable in the bush when he realised he’d fucked up? More to the point: What were the teachers thinking leaving them to their own devices out here, as though the threat of missing the formal – which most of the boys didn’t care about – was enough to keep them in line.

She cleaned away the dust and grit on Priya’s knee to find an angry bruise purpling around a deep cut. ‘Shit. This is bad, Pri.’

‘You don’t believe me about the ghost, do you?’ Priya said, wincing at the antiseptic sting as Raffi swabbed the wound.

‘Put it this way: I believe you encountered a malevolent entity who intended you harm,’ Raffi said, fishing in the first-aid kit for a pair of butterfly stitches and taping them over the cut. ‘But it wasn’t Smiling Jack.’

‘You still think it was Grady?’

Raffi shrugged and covered the stitches with a square dressing to keep the wound clean. ‘If it wasn’t him, then it was one of his friends – someone who knew about the mask.’

Priya frowned. ‘I guess that makes sense. But what if . . .?’

What if . . .? What if . . .? What if . . .?

‘Don’t make excuses for them,’ Raffi said, as much to herself as to Priya. ‘If you say it’s a ghost, they’ll get away with it.’ She noticed Priya had her shoes on, but no socks. And she wasn’t wearing a bra – as though she’d dressed in a hurry. And Priya never dressed in a hurry. ‘What were you doing out there, anyway?’

Priya narrowed her eyes, turning defensive. ‘You mean because I’ve been drinking? You think I should have known better?’

‘No, of course not. But I thought you were spending the night with Jase.’ Raffi hesitated, sensing she needed to tread carefully. ‘Did – did something happen between you two?’

‘Like what? We’re fine,’ Priya said. ‘And I don’t need you, of all people, psychoanalysing my relationship.’

Raffi felt taken aback. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’re not with your boyfriend tonight, either.’

From Priya’s tone, Raffi figured she knew about the kiss. She and Mack would need to catch her up, though now wasn’t the time.

‘I wasn’t trying to stick my nose in, Priya. I just meant that if something had happened and you wanted to talk about it, you could talk to me.’

But Raffi saw she’d hit a nerve and Priya was too drunk, too rattled, to see the offer for what it was.

‘You think you’re so good at reading the room, Raffi. But you don’t always get it right,’ Priya said, fighting to keep her voice steady. ‘In fact, if this were a horror movie, you’d have it all wrong. The mask would be a decoy. Smiling Jack would have left it there so we’d have this exact fight. He’d be working to turn us against each other, creating distractions to keep us from seeing the danger we’re in so he could lure us, one by one, into the dark. And we both know there’s only one way to survive that movie: you have to admit the monster is real. You have to see him for what he is.’

‘This isn’t a movie, Priya,’ Raffi said. And she didn’t think Smiling Jack was behind the so-called hauntings, but Priya was half-right. You did need to look the monster in the eye, though in order to survive, you had to go one step further. You had to prove yourself his equal – you had to confront him.

‘Hey, where are you going?’ Priya said as Raffi stood from her chair.

Raffi picked up the salt canister from the bench and turned to look at Priya over her shoulder as she headed for the door. ‘To vanquish our ghost.’

It was nearing two am when she stepped outside, armed with the salt, her torch and her sleeping bag. The temperature had cooled to match the hour and the night was so quiet and still it might have been frozen. Or spelled. Raffi stood on the verandah and cast her torch over the surrounding bushland. Her breath plumed in the icy air – the cold like splinters in her throat. If there was something out there that meant them harm, then what she was about to do was extremely dangerous. But something – or, more likely, someone – had frightened Priya and Mack, and the need to put a stop to that made her bold.

She left her sleeping bag on the verandah and stepped down into the clearing.

‘I see you,’ she said, tipping the salt so that it poured in a line behind her as she began to walk a slow circle around the lodge. ‘I see you. I see what you’re doing. And I feel sorry for you.’

Her heart was racing, but she kept her eyes up and spoke clearly, focusing on each syllable so her voice wouldn’t shake. ‘Does creeping on drunk girls make you feel powerful? Do you enjoy being the big, bad monster?’

The hairs on the back of her neck prickled; somewhere close, a grin was stretching wide. Raffi resisted the urge to turn and look. It’s just Grady, she told herself. Just one of the boys.

‘Are you lonely?’ she asked. ‘Is that what this is? You want to be close to us, but you don’t know how?’

She reached the fire pit where footprints had scuffed the magic from the first salt ring. She wished she could roll back the night, and then some. Rewind the past few months and try again. Keep Sy as a friend. Kiss Mack in the light. Play ‘Never Have I Ever’ while toasting marshmallows like they were supposed to instead of calling on ghosts. Maybe then they wouldn’t have gone their separate ways from the fire.

‘I once read that a ghost is old pain,’ she said, raising her eyes to the dark again. ‘I don’t know if that’s what you are, or if you’re pretending. Either way, something awful must have happened to you to make you stoop to this, and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry someone hurt you. But coming after us will only break you further.’

She kept walking, careful to keep the new line of salt unbroken behind her, charging it with her words.

‘Do you hear me out there?’ she called. ‘I helped make you, Smiling Jack! You’re my ghost. I called you here tonight! And you can haunt me all you want, but I won’t let you hurt my friends.’

MACK

Mack dreamed of ghosts. Uncertain shapes flickering in firelight beyond a lace scrim. Circling closer. Bare feet in white dust. Laughter beneath cackling flames. Four girls, arms stark in the air and their faces veiled by unbound hair, chanting an old lullaby. Words she’d never understood at last coming clear, spelling out a warning. There was a name on her lips. Blood on her tongue. The preening scent of a boy and whisky. Her muscles locked in place. A mighty hand lifted in a wave and landed heavily on her head, fingers pressing tight against her skull. Forcing her down, down, down to a nightmare place. Smoke thick in her nose. Flames licking away her skin. Stars like embers. A thousand midnights laid across her eyes.

Even when she opened them, that deep dark remained. But she was not alone. There was another body in the bed. Raffi. The memory of a sweeter heat returned, chasing off the dream. Mack couldn’t see her, but she felt the warm exhalation of her breath against her neck and the featherlight touch of her fingertips stroking her cheek, teasing her awake.

‘That feels good,’ she murmured.

Raffi said nothing, but continued to touch her, tracing the curve of her lip and the line of her jaw. She must have pulled down the blinds and switched off the lamp after Mack fell asleep, so that the dark was total. Velvet and lush. All the better for Raffi to learn Mack by heart.

Mack smiled to herself, remembering the way Raffi bit her lip when she leaned in to kiss her and end their fight. Nervous and wanting. Goosebumps rising on her skin beneath Mack’s touch. Their hair twined ebony and gold against the pillow, and the only kiss she’d believed they’d ever share, now just one in a growing constellation. She sensed Raffi smiling with her as she ran her fingertip along the edge of her ear. Mack shifted to face her, wanting to return the thrill. Share it together. But Raffi caught her hand as Mack reached for her cheek and guided it gently away: My turn.

Sure fingers trailed soft through her hair. Knuckles glided down her neck.

Mack couldn’t wait to hold Raffi’s hand in front of their friends. To go on dates – actual dates – and slow dance together at the formal. But she liked this, too. Their bodies dissolved in the dark. She felt like Psyche in the Greek myth, stroked by unseen hands. No doubt that was the reference Raffi was channelling. Mack’s thoughts were still sleep-blurred and fuzzy, and she closed her eyes and let herself drift, lulled by Raffi’s phantom touch.

Mack was alone when she next came fully to. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed: whether she’d been dozing or deeply asleep. Had that soft, stroking hand been real or a dream? The night felt unsteady. Lurching between moments spotlit in the dark. She stretched out her arm and felt the still-warm mattress beside her. Real. It had to be real.

‘Raffi?’ she whispered, and listened for the sound of running taps. Returning footsteps in the hall. But minutes passed and the house remained quiet. And dark. So dark. Mack frowned and checked the space beside her again: definitely still warm. Raffi couldn’t have been gone more than a moment before Mack woke.

Her head spun as she sat up and fumbled for the lamp switch. The light cast a soft glow over the bed, leaving the room’s corners in shadow. Mack scrutinised them with a wary eye before turning her attention to her green Baby-G watch on the bedside table. Four am. The buzz from the weed and vodka had long-since drained away, leaving her fur-mouthed and heavy-limbed, her head pulsing with the beginning of a hangover. She needed water.

Needed Raffi.

Where was she?

The shadows seemed to gather themselves as Mack eased out of bed and rummaged in her duffel for a jumper. She left the lamp on to light her way, and a chill tickled her neck as she crossed the room. As though something were waiting in there with her, after all. Watching. Waiting. Her thoughts slid back towards the shape she’d seen on the other side of the shower curtain.

Which was nothing, she reminded herself.

Even still, her sense of unease lingered as she ventured into the dark hallway. The carpet was rough and cold beneath her bare feet. Gritty too: in need of a vacuum. She was heading for the kitchen, but changed course when she saw that the door to Raffi and Priya’s room stood open, spilling soft light into the hall.

Inside, Priya was huddled deep in her sleeping bag, her breath hitching in snores the way it always did when she drank too much. Mack figured she hadn’t wanted to risk being sprung with Jase when the teachers made their morning rounds and had passed out with the bedside lamp still on and her clothes in a puddle on the floor. But Raffi’s bed was empty. And her sleeping bag was missing.

Mack checked the kitchen, bathroom and living room, her confusion curdling to worry until she discovered the couch pushed askew and the front door ajar. She found Raffi asleep on the verandah steps with her torch fallen beside her, its weak beam shining across the clearing.

Mack felt a rush of relief. Raffi was fine. They were fine. She’d probably come out here to make a journal entry. Begin the work of setting down their story. Or just to be with the night. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Mack squatted beside her and gently shook her awake. ‘Hey, stargazer.’ Raffi’s skin was chill to the touch. ‘It’s freezing out here. Come back to bed.’

‘Can’t. Ghost watch,’ Raffi mumbled, still half-asleep.

Mack cocked an eyebrow, trying for sceptical but landing at wary. ‘I thought there was no such thing.’

Raffi sat up straighter and shook her head with a sigh. ‘Priya got spooked on her way home. I’m keeping lookout.’

Mack frowned. ‘What did she see?’

‘Smiling Jack, of course.’ Raffi looked rueful. ‘I’m pretty sure it was Grady McGregor – apparently he’s been creeping around in a mask – but I wish I never told that story. I feel as though I set us up.’

‘It’s not your fault, Raf,’ Mack assured her. ‘Is Priya okay?’

‘She was pretty rattled.’ Raffi lowered her voice. ‘I think she had a fight with Jase.’

Mack’s brows shot up. ‘The Labrador has teeth?’

‘Who knew, right?’

But something felt wrong. Very, very wrong. The timing didn’t add up. Raffi’s skin was cold. The bed had been warm.

The first tinkling notes of dread stirred in Mack’s belly and she hugged herself against the icy air.

‘How long have you been out here?’

Raffi shrugged. ‘An hour? Two? Long enough to freeze solid.’ She rolled her eyes skyward and stuck out her jaw – Jack Nicholson in the snow at the end of The Shining.

Mack felt unsteady and the verandah seemed to tilt beneath her.

Someone had touched her.

Someone she hadn’t been able to see.

Her mind reeled, trying to make sense of it. It must have been Raffi who drew the blind and turned out the lights when she got up. And maybe Mack had rolled over in her sleep and warmed the other side of the bed herself? But that hand in the dark had felt so real . . .

‘You’re shaking, Mack.’ Raffi rubbed her arm, warming away the goosebumps. ‘It’s sweet of you to check on me, but I have no use for a hypothermic girlfriend.’

Mack smiled, despite her unease. ‘We’re official, then?’

Raffi cocked her head to the side, sizing her up. ‘Yeah, reckon I’ll keep you around. So long as we can take it slow? Tonight was . . .’ a blush crept into her cheeks as she searched for the word ‘. . . educational. But also . . .’

‘Everything all at once?’ Mack finished.

Raffi nodded and reached for her hand again, giving it a gentle squeeze.

‘I don’t want us to skip any steps.’

It had been a dream.

It had to have been a dream.

‘Raffi Vecchio, are you asking me out on a date?’

‘A first date,’ Raffi clarified. ‘Dinner and a movie, this weekend.’

Mack nodded. ‘Classic choice. And do you kiss on a first date?’

Raffi leaned in, close enough that her breath tickled Mack’s ear. ‘You’ll have to wait and see. Although –’ she kept her voice low and suggestive ‘– there is something you could do to warm me up in the meantime.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ Mack grinned, wanting to kiss her right then and there. Kiss her long and deep until the night wore thin and dawn blushed through. ‘What’s that?’

‘Pop the kettle on? Two sugars, no milk?’

Mack groaned. ‘You’re killing me, Vecchio.’ But she made a show of kissing Raffi’s hand before letting her go to do her bidding, wanting Raffi to know: she could do slow. She could be steady.

Back inside, Mack saw the broken skull mask on the coffee table and picked it up, tracing her fingers over its leering grin. Was this what had them so scared – Jase and his friends dicking around? If that were the case, she’d feel silly and gullible for letting them get to her. But part of her wasn’t convinced. It didn’t quite fit. She’d been sure that someone was in bed beside her, and the boys wouldn’t cross that line. She didn’t think any of them would have creeped on her in the bathroom either. It was too intimate, too intrusive, and she couldn’t shake the sense that there was something more sinister at work. Her thoughts drifted back to the grinning man she’d seen on the fire track, hovering above the ground in the heat. And fear rippled through her.

She switched on her bedroom light and the hall lights on her way to the kitchen and found herself humming No Doubt’s ‘Don’t Speak’ as she hunted out an ancient box of English Breakfast teabags and a jar of lumpy sugar from the kitchen’s sparse pantry. That was odd, too. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d listened to that song – she hadn’t even realised she knew it beyond the chorus – but the moment she recalled the man on the fire track, it had begun playing with perfect clarity in her head. She was singing it through a second time while the kettle worked up to a boil when she heard the toilet flush.

Mack turned to see Shelley emerge from the bathroom, one hand gripping her stomach and her mouth twisted in a grimace. Poor girl. She seemed almost unaware of her surroundings as she shuffled back towards her room. But then she stopped, her attention snagged by something in the back door window. Her eyes switched from glassy to hyper-alert in an instant, and her hands tensed to claws.

‘Shelley?’

Shelley kept staring – entranced – at the back door. Mack could hear her breathing in short, heavy huffs. It was . . . well, she didn’t want to judge, but it was weird. It occurred to Mack that she hadn’t checked on Shelley when she woke. There’d been no reason to, but now she wondered: Shelley had left flowers on their pillows; could she also have gone into Mack’s room a second time? She went cold at the thought. That girl is a stranger, her inner voice cautioned. You don’t know a thing about her.

‘Hey, are you okay?’ Mack tried again, more wary this time.

When Shelley still didn’t reply, Mack moved slowly – cautiously – towards her and saw that her pyjama top was clammy with sweat. Her whole body was rigid, save her heaving chest, and she was giving off a smell, too. That same stink she’d had at the fire. Mack hesitated, fighting the urge to gag, before reaching out to touch Shelley’s shoulder.

Shelley flinched with a sound close to a hiss.

Mack jumped, too. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.’

‘Did you find him?’ Shelley’s voice was thick and monotone, and though she was now looking at Mack, her gaze seemed to pass right through her. ‘He’s in the trees.’

Mack’s heart clenched; Shelley had said the same thing at the fire track.

‘Who?’

A face flashed into Mack’s mind, bloodied and eyeless, and there were insects swarming inside her as she forced herself to look outside. But the glass was dark, showing only their smeared reflections in the faint sheen from the hall and mudroom lights.

Shelley shook her head, her trance-like state giving way to confusion, and Mack wondered whether she’d been sleepwalking. ‘No one. Sorry.’ Her expression remained troubled and she put a hand against the wall to steady herself. ‘My head’s a mess. These cramps are killing me and I can’t sleep.’ She glanced back towards her bedroom. ‘Someone keeps walking up and down the hall . . .’

Mack felt a twinge of guilt; she, Raffi and Priya had been keeping her awake.

‘I’m making tea. You want a cup? Maybe some ibuprofen?’ she offered, hoping Shelley would refuse.

But Shelley followed her into the kitchen and settled herself at the table.

‘Tea would be great,’ she told Mack, her lips twitching to an unsteady smile. ‘I’ll keep you company.’

SHELLEY

Shelley felt ugly and exposed under the kitchen light, but it beat going back to bed. She’d given up on sleep and pretending that it was just her period making her feel unlike herself. The bathroom mirror had revealed punch-dark circles beneath her eyes. Heat rolled through her in waves and her body felt hostile, as though she were allergic to the town. Or something in it. She tested her breath against her palm, disguising it as a yawn when Mack returned from taking Raffi her tea. Her mouth was still sour from earlier that evening, even though she’d brushed her teeth. Twice. No wonder Mack had baulked when she saw her. And then there was the figure in the hall by her room reflected in the back door glass. Grinning and intent. Broad shouldered, like Matthew Rourke.

‘Sorry if I freaked you out before,’ she told Mack. ‘I’m having a weird night. New people, strange place . . . it’s all a bit much.’

Mack shook her head as she set their mugs on the table.

‘I’m the one who should apologise,’ she said, taking the seat opposite Shelley. ‘Things got out of hand at the fire. Priya shouldn’t have pressured you to get high with us, and all that talk of ghosts . . .’ She gave an involuntary shudder.

Shelley shrugged, remembering how she’d heard about parties and sleepovers at her old school by eavesdropping on other girls’ Monday whispers. ‘It was nice to be included.’

Mack’s face softened with pity and Shelley scrambled to move the conversation on.

‘Thanks for the flower, too. It cheered me up.’

‘What flower?’ Mack frowned.

‘The grevillea on my pillow. That was you, wasn’t it?’

Mack stared at her. ‘Raffi and I thought it was you.’

Shelley shook her head. But she wished she’d thought of it. Little kindnesses didn’t come naturally to her.

It’s no wonder you don’t have any friends.

‘What about at the bonfire?’ Mack pressed. ‘Did you pull Raffi’s hair?’

The question took Shelley by surprise, and she didn’t like the suspicious way Mack was looking at her.

‘No,’ she replied, truthfully, keeping her voice calm. ‘How could that have been me? I was holding her hand at the time.’

Mack seemed unconvinced, and that stung. She’d wanted to believe Mack was on her side.

‘Look, this is going to sound strange, but did you –’ Mack hesitated, clearly feeling awkward ‘– did you come into my room before?’

‘While you were sleeping, you mean?’ Shelley stared at Mack. This was bad. Very, very bad. ‘Why would I do that, Mack?’

‘You tell me.’

Because you’re a spooky girl.

Creepy bitch.

Psycho whore.

She gave Mack a thin smile. ‘I think I’ll take my tea back to bed.’

‘Shit, I’m sorry.’ Mack wiped a hand across her eyes. ‘That came out all wrong. I had a nightmare and it’s made me paranoid. The flowers must be from Priya. Or it was someone from another lodge being friendly. Or weird. I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter.’

Shelley sensed that Mack didn’t quite believe this, and didn’t quite believe her.

‘I promise I’m not normally this jittery,’ Mack assured her. ‘It’s this place. I can’t shake the feeling that someone or something’s watching us. Like there’s a presence here. It’s probably all in my head. Too much pot or whatever, but it’s freaking me out. And you seemed . . . not yourself before.’ She leaned across the table and lowered her voice in concern. ‘What were you looking at in the back door window?’

I don’t know. I can’t remember. I have a headache. That was the safe answer – the answer Shelley had been giving for the past six weeks to the police, her parents and Matthew’s friends at school. They all wanted to know about the things she’d seen, too, and what she’d been doing with Matthew Rourke at Weemala Reserve the afternoon he died. Even her psychologist seemed more concerned with recovering her memory of that unspeakable hour than ensuring her wellbeing.

She hadn’t told anyone about the nightmares that bled into her days, or that Matthew Rourke had begun haunting her weeks before he died. The words were too hard to fix on. But Mack had been kind to her on the bus that afternoon when she might so easily have been cruel or indifferent. That had to count for something. She wasn’t a friend, exactly, but she might still listen. It would be such a relief. And maybe, when it was just two of you alone and the dark pressed close, the rules shifted and you could talk about these things. Shelley reached deep, drawing up his name. A ghost. A curse.

‘Matthew.’

‘The boy from your old school?’ Mack frowned: clearly not the answer she’d expected. ‘That’s who you saw?’

‘All the shadows look like him,’ Shelley admitted. ‘He won’t leave me alone.’

‘I thought you weren’t close?’

Shelley reddened at the lie. ‘We weren’t friends,’ she clarified. ‘Me and Matt . . . it was complicated.’

Mack seemed almost relieved. ‘I’m well versed in complicated.’

‘It wasn’t like you and Raffi,’ Shelley said. ‘I noticed things seemed sort of awkward between you two earlier, but she looks at you like you’re a sunset over water.’

Mack flushed, pleased.

‘I used to dream that Matt might look at me that way.’ She grimaced at the memory and popped two ibuprofen from the first-aid kit open on the table and swallowed them dry. ‘He was a year older – my brother Aaron’s friend. He had this swoopy, Leo DiCaprio hair. Sapphire eyes, diamond smile – the full Prince Charming cliché. And he always seemed so sure of himself.’ So sure of what he could get away with. ‘I envied that.’

Shelley felt sick now when she thought about how she’d rush to the bathroom to put on mascara and lip gloss and shorten her school skirt by folding over the waistband when Matt came over to hang out with Aaron and their friends after school. So desperate. So pathetic.

‘It was one of those intense, ridiculous crushes.’ Nothing was ever going to happen – that was part of the appeal. It was safe. ‘Aaron used to tease me about it. All his friends did. But Matt acted oblivious. Like I was beneath his notice. I wasn’t even sure he knew my name, until Aaron’s eighteenth.’

Shelley stopped and took a long drink of her tea while she gathered her words. The first part of the story was easy. The rest? Not so much.

Mack reached across the table to lay a hand on her arm. ‘I’m listening. Take your time.’

Shelley nodded and took another minute to order her thoughts.

‘Mum and Dad threw Aaron this big party at our house. Most of Year Twelve came, and a bunch of people stayed the night.’ It was her first real party, with dancing and alcohol – and she’d hoped it would be just like the ones she’d seen in teen movies. ‘Mum gave me money for a new dress – silvery-blue with spaghetti straps – and I spent the whole afternoon experimenting with different hairstyles and make-up.’

Shelley smiled, despite herself: she’d felt pretty that night. Like Laney Boggs in She’s All That, or Kat Stratford in Ten Things I Hate About You transformed for the prom. Better even, because she wasn’t anyone’s wager or pity project. She’d been cool and sophisticated, her hair curled in soft waves and her nail polish shining under the pergola lights as she drank Cruisers and danced with her brother’s friends.

‘Matthew showed up alone after speeches; his girlfriend Tori was sick. He seemed out of sorts. Like maybe they’d had a fight. I never found out for sure. He kept catching my eye and asked me to dance when “Teenager of the Year” came on. In a jokey way, but still. It felt good. Unexpected, but good.’

Even as she said it, she felt his champagne-fizzed breath tickle the hair by her ear. You look cute tonight, Shelley.

Her shoulders tensed and she took another sip of tea. ‘I tried not to think anything of it. He liked to flirt, especially when Tori wasn’t around. And he danced with lots of girls that night.’

Her parents had eventually made them cut the music to avoid a noise complaint and the guests staying over made beds out of throw rugs and couch cushions in the living room. Shelley went to her room at the other end of the house with Matthew’s words still whispering in her ear. She put on her pyjamas and her crimson-and-purple lava lamp, dug out her Looking for Alibrandi soundtrack and played ‘Teenager of the Year’ over and over on her Discman until she fell asleep. The music was still playing, the headphones slipped from her ears, when she was woken by a quiet knock at her door.

‘Matt came into my room after everyone was asleep,’ she told Mack, her voice flat and her heart beating quickly as it had that night.

She’d stuffed her Discman under her bed – mortified that he might learn what song she’d been listening to – and heard the soft click of the lock as he closed the door.

‘Hey.’ His voice was smoky and thick with drink.

‘What . . .’ are you doing here? she started to say, sitting up, but Matt pressed a finger to his lips and the neck of a bottle clinked against the ring he wore on his other hand.

‘Can I trust you to keep a secret, Shelley?’

She couldn’t make sense of what was happening. It felt surreal. But exciting. ‘Of course.’

‘Good. We need music.’ He crossed to the CD player on her dresser, switching it on and hitting ‘play’ without checking what she had loaded up. No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom. The opening notes of ‘Don’t Speak’ drifted out and he adjusted the volume so that it would hide their voices from anyone passing in the hall without disturbing those sleeping elsewhere in the house. Then he came and sat on the edge of her bed, his thigh pressing against her hip and his features soft in the lamplight.

‘I have something for you.’

He leaned closer and she caught the whiff of alcohol and sweat beneath his Covet cologne and closed her eyes, thinking he meant to kiss her.

She’d only been kissed once before. By Ollie Shepherd in a game of spin the bottle at Bree Russo’s thirteenth birthday. It lasted three seconds, with everyone counting down, and Ollie had wiped his mouth after, so it probably didn’t count.

This would be different. She’d practised on her arm and in the mirror – rehearsed it a thousand times in her head. And Matt had come to her. He wanted her.

But instead of a kiss, he pressed the bottle to her lips. The liquid tasted of fire. Burned her throat. She tried to be cool about it, but her eyes watered and she let out a barking cough.

‘Good stuff, right?’ His eyes moved over her in the semi-dark. ‘Have some more. Go on.’

This time he pushed the bottle against her teeth and held her head, forcing her to take a deeper drink. She was sure he didn’t mean to be as rough as he was – he was just tipsy.

The whisky’s warmth spread through her chest, softening her edges. She still couldn’t believe Matthew Rourke was in her room. Was sitting on her bed. Tucking her hair behind her ear. He was talking again, looking at her with something earnest and hungry in his expression. His smile coercive as a blade.

‘You’re so beautiful, Shelley. I want to look at you. Would that be all right?’

She knew she should say no. It wasn’t fair to Tori, and Shelley wasn’t the kind of person who messed around with anyone’s significant other. Until five minutes ago, she hadn’t messed around with anyone, period. But Matt was already undoing the buttons of her pyjama top, parting the fabric to expose her chest.

‘Have you done this before?’ he whispered.

Done what? she wondered. How far did he plan to go? She wanted to ask what he was doing in her room after years of ignoring her and why they were fast-forwarding past flirting and hand-holding and kissing, and all the other things couples did in her favourite rom-coms before the camera cut away. But she was scared that if she said too much, he’d come to his senses and stop. So she shook her head and managed a nervous smile.

‘First time.’

That seemed to please him. He stretched himself out on the bed beside her, splaying his broad palm across her belly. ‘I’m going to make you feel good, okay?’

He slipped his hand beneath the waistband of her pyjamas before she could reply. She was too shocked, too stunned – her head spinning from the whisky – to object.

‘This is so cool of you, Shelley. You’re so cool.’

His fingers moved clumsily, jabbing and chaffing. And it hurt. She bit her cheek to keep from crying out, but after a minute, she couldn’t stand it.

‘That’s enough.’ She tried to shift his hand.

He blinked down at her, surprised. ‘Already?’ A smile played over his lips. ‘You’re good?’

‘Yeah.’

She felt relieved when he pulled away. Maybe this was the part where he would hold her and kiss her? But he fumbled with his belt buckle and tugged her pyjamas and underwear down to her knees, which was somehow worse than taking them off completely.

And then . . .

And then . . .

Pain.

Like nothing she’d ever felt. A blunt knife flaying her from the inside. She tried to tell him to stop, but his hand was pressing hard against her mouth.

‘Shhhh. We don’t want to wake the others.’

His bulk pinned her down, pressing her deeper into the mattress with every thrust. He kept whispering to her: ‘You’re amazing, Shelley, and this is so special. So beautiful. I’ll never forget it.’ As though, if he kept repeating the words, she’d believe them.

She dug her nails into the fleshy part of her palm, hard enough to draw blood. Draw her focus, and concentrated on Gwen Stefani’s crooning voice, the soft crimson shapes drifting in the lamp’s twilight glow and the warm tears running over her temples.

‘Shelley?’

Mack touched her hand, and she flinched.

‘You okay?’

She blinked at the bright kitchen light and laid her hands flat against the table, making sure it was solid and real. Far, far away from that awful night.

‘You disappeared for a minute there.’ Mack’s expression was kind, but uncertain, and Shelley sensed she’d landed her deep in uncharted territory. It was too much. They hardly knew each other.

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise. Matthew came into your room,’ she prompted, in a softer voice. ‘Did he hurt you?’

Shelley nodded, gaze drowning in her tea.

‘How – how far did he go?’

Shelley hugged herself and tried to make the words, but they wouldn’t come.

After, Matt had been almost tender as he helped her back into her pyjamas and stroked her cheek.

‘This was so much fun, Shelley. Our little secret, yeah? It’s more special that way.’

He’d tucked her in, as though she were a treat he was trying to put back in its wrapper.

‘Did you tell your parents? Report him?’ Mack asked.

Shelley wished she’d had a friend like Mack to confide in when it happened. Someone to share the awful weight and tell her what to do. Instead, she’d been alone, trying to make sense of how her long-held dream had played out as a nightmare. At the time, she’d been mortified to think she might have somehow enticed Matt to cheat on his girlfriend. And she knew sex was supposed to feel good – Matt had even said so. The fact that it hadn’t, made Shelley wonder if there was something wrong with her. Like maybe she was frigid. Why would she tell her parents about that? Later, she wondered if Matt chose her because he knew there was no one in her corner. No one who would believe that he would want her. And no way for her to prove what he’d done.

‘I told Tori – his girlfriend.’

Mack grimaced: it was a bad move, obvious to anyone who knew anything about how high-school hierarchies work. Obvious to anyone but Shelley.

‘I figured she deserved to know – I’d want to know, if I was with someone who’d done a thing like that. And I wondered if maybe he’d hurt her, too.’

On Monday at school, she’d put a note in Tori’s locker asking to meet her behind the Science block by the school’s back fence where the trees grew thick and the only people likely to interrupt them were the kids reckless enough to risk smoking on campus. They’d never spoken more than a few words to each other, and Shelley was worried Tori wouldn’t show. But she’d been waiting for her, leaning against a tree with her arms crossed and her expression hard, almost as though she knew what it meant that Shelley wanted to speak to her after the party she’d missed. Shelley’s heart was a slippery bulge in her throat, and Tori went very tense and still as she recounted what had happened. Livid, Shelley thought at the time. She’d looked livid. Shelley was scared she’d explode. Scream at her for not doing more to ward off Matt’s advances.

Instead, Tori had fixed her with a piercing look. ‘Who else knows about this?’

‘No one, yet,’ Shelley assured her. ‘But we should do something, right? Warn other girls?’

Tori had given her a tight little smile. ‘Leave it with me.’

Shelley had watched her stride back across the oval, ponytail swinging, and assumed Tori would break up with Matthew. That she was grateful Shelley had confided in her. So when she saw them walk out of the Year Twelve common room hand in hand later that afternoon, she was confused. That confusion shifted to unease when she started getting venomous looks from Tori’s friends. But it wasn’t until she saw Shelley Martin is a lying skank graffitied in spiky letters on the wall in the girls’ toilets that she realised her mistake.

‘Tori changed the story,’ she told Mack. ‘She started a rumour that I’d forced myself on Matt, and that he’d woken up in the middle of the night with me kissing and rubbing myself against him. He said it was true, and that he felt sorry for me being so desperate. Things were bad at school after that.’

Shelley cupped her hands around her tea, anchoring herself as she remembered how she’d gone from being invisible to radioactive overnight. She’d felt boys’ eyes moving over her in class. They sent her dirty IMs and left condoms in her locker. A few even tried following her home. The girls weren’t much better. They clung tighter to their boyfriends when she passed them in the halls. Whispered that she was a two-faced slut. A traitor. A witch. Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that dumpy, pimpled girls with frizzy hair and B-cup breasts have no business thinking about refined specimens of Matthew Rourke’s ilk. Let alone touching them. Tainting them.

The worst of it was, she began to believe their whispers. Maybe it had been her fault. Maybe all those nights she lay awake imagining Matt beside her had served as a summoning spell. Her body no longer felt like her own. She started getting headaches. Experiencing strange pains and violent urges. Losing time. Part of her remained locked in her room, living that terrible night over and over, and she no longer felt sure what she was capable of.

And then came that stormy afternoon at the reserve. She and Matthew alone for the first time since Aaron’s party. The wolf and the witch.

‘How soon did all that happen before he died?’ Mack asked, as though reading her thoughts.

‘A few weeks.’

Mack paused. ‘That soon?’

Shelley recognised the wariness in her voice as her cue to put Mack at ease. But nothing about her dealings with Matthew had been easy.

‘I mean, for him to do that to you, and then to die . . .’

‘Bad timing, right?’ Shelley agreed.

Mack shook her head. If she suspected Shelley of anything, she was canny enough to hold her tongue. ‘No wonder you see him everywhere; it must have been awful.’

Shelley glanced up from her tea to look Mack dead in the eye. ‘Matthew Rourke was a monster. He got what he deserved.’

MACK

Mack didn’t know what to do with everything Shelley had told her. What Matthew had done to her was awful – every girl’s nightmare. But to have only her word as proof and for her story to be twisted and turned against her when she tried to speak out seemed almost worse. A horrifying injustice. It made Mack want to scream. She wondered how Matthew had died. If it had been violent – the report in the paper had been vague, focusing instead on Matthew’s achievements. The tragedy of it all. She’d wanted to ask Shelley about it, but something in the way Shelley looked at her made her bite her tongue.

The effort of telling her story seemed to leave Shelley hollowed out and, though it was almost dawn, she’d gone back to bed. Alone in the kitchen, Mack set the kettle boiling for more tea and listened as the house settled into the new day, becoming benign once more as the looming spectre of Smiling Jack dissolved in the first flush of morning light.

She watched through the windows as a pair of wallabies hopped from the scrub to nose at the firepit and felt ashamed for thinking Shelley had been out to scare them when it was now so plain that she was hurting – her thoughts a million miles from camp-fire pranks.

Mack was still standing by the window when Priya came in, already dressed in cargo shorts, Sketchers and a baby-doll tee. With her hair in glossy braids beneath a hibiscus-patterned bucket hat, she looked like a backup dancer for an S Club 7 video. Or she would have done, if not for the deep circles beneath her eyes and something tense in her posture.

‘Morning!’ Her voice was hard and bright as diamonds.

‘You’re chipper. Good night?’

‘Big night,’ Priya replied, and Mack saw that her hands were grazed and shaking as she dug through the bag of food supplies for the jar of instant coffee.

‘Are you okay?’

Priya nodded, flashing a tight smile. ‘Hungover as hell, but I’ll survive.’

‘What happened to your hands, and your knee?’ Mack asked, nodding at the dressing peeking beneath the hem of her shorts. ‘That looks nasty.’

Priya wriggled her shorts lower on her hips to cover the wound. ‘Gravity and I had a disagreement on the way home. But it’s fine. I’m fine.’

She did not seem fine.

‘Raffi said you saw the ghost,’ Mack pressed.

Priya froze, just for a millisecond, before she snorted and rolled her eyes. ‘I was drunk as a skunk – probably told her I saw Santa and the Easter Bunny, too. But if Raffi spoke to you about it, does that mean you two sorted things out?’

Mack’s cheeks glowed warm. ‘We might have done more than that.’

‘Really?’ Some of the tension went out of Priya’s shoulders and she seemed surprised but pleased. ‘I’m glad something good came of last night – so long as you don’t neglect your squeaky third wheel.’

Mack shook her head. ‘We three are bound, as Raffi would say. We’d never ditch you, Pri.’

‘Speaking of triple threats, where is Raffi?’

‘Outside. Keeping watch.’

Priya barked an uncertain laugh. ‘She’s such a drama queen.’

Mack was having none of it. ‘She was worried about you, Priya. Are you really going to pretend nothing happened?’

‘Nothing did happen. Grady was just being a dickhead and I overreacted,’ Priya said, hugging her arms across her chest. ‘It’s embarrassing, okay?’

‘No, it’s not okay!’ Mack shot back. ‘Someone tried to scare me last night, too. They came inside our lodge. I – I don’t think we’re safe here.’

Priya bit her lip, still hugging herself, and for a moment Mack thought she was going to drop her guard and be real with her. But then something shifted in Priya’s expression – her pride kicking in – and she shook her head.

‘Oh. My God. Paranoid much? It was a game, Mack. The boys were just having fun.’

Mack ran a hand through her hair, exasperated. Priya’s shiny-perfect act was exhausting. Infuriating. They had both been scared last night. And if Priya could just get over herself for five seconds and admit that, then maybe – maybe –

Mack stopped, arm frozen in the air, and stared at her bare wrist.

Oh God. Oh no.

‘What’s wrong?’ Priya asked.

Dread stirred in Mack’s belly. ‘My bracelet’s gone.’

‘The rainbow one?’ Priya frowned.

‘Yes. Shit.’

It was old, she reasoned, trying to calm herself. The yarn was wearing thin. It probably just broke while she was sleeping. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. But the curdling in her stomach grew worse. She felt hot and her heart began to race.

‘What if . . . What if –?’

‘We’ll find it, Mack.’ Priya placed a steadying hand on her arm. ‘It’s probably in your room. I’ll help you look.’

They turned Mack’s room inside out and then, with Raffi’s help, searched the bathroom, living room, hall, kitchen and verandah – everywhere Mack had been. And the more lost the bracelet became, the more panicked Mack felt, her thoughts spinning back to that seeking hand in the velvet dark.

After she and Raffi had dressed for the day and they’d all eaten breakfast, they searched each room again, just in case. They were on their second pass of the living room when Mr Wallace rat-a-tat-tatted on the front door and let himself in.

‘What’s all the commotion, folks?’

He’d swapped his usual collared shirt and tie for a polo shirt tucked into belted shorts, khaki socks and hiking sandals, and completed the look with a gym whistle – scheduled fun, here we come!

‘Mack’s lost her bracelet,’ Priya said, setting the couch cushions straight.

‘It was stolen,’ Mack clarified.

‘Whoa, Nellie.’ Mr Wallace put his hands up to calm her. ‘Let’s establish the facts before we jump to conclusions. Where do you last remember seeing it?’

Mack bit down her impatience. ‘On my wrist. I never take it off. I was wearing it when I went to bed last night and now it’s gone.’

‘All righty, first things first. Why don’t you go ahead and give your sleeping bag a good shakeout?’

‘We’ve already looked everywhere it could be!’ Mack’s voice was creeping towards shrill and she forced herself to speak slowly and clearly so Mr Wallace would take her seriously. ‘Someone was in our lodge last night. They came into my room.’

Raffi widened her eyes at Mack in alarm over Mr Wallace’s shoulder: this was news to her.

But Mr Wallace remained sceptical. ‘Another student, you mean?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘You didn’t get a look at them?’

Mack shook her head. ‘It was dark.’

‘But you’re sure there was someone in your room?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then help me out here. Did you hear them moving around?’

‘Well, no –’

Mr Wallace sighed. ‘These are serious allegations, Mackenzie. If you didn’t see or hear anyone, what makes you think there was an intruder?’

They were in the bed, touching me. Mack opened her mouth to speak, but she couldn’t say those words to her middle-aged, male Maths teacher. It was too humiliating. Mortifying. And a tiny part of her still believed – hoped – that it had somehow been a terrible dream. She couldn’t prove it was real, even to herself. ‘I sensed them. They were breathing on me.’

She knew how weak it sounded.

‘We also found a mask,’ Raffi said, coming to her defence. ‘It was on the verandah. We’re pretty sure it belongs to Grady McGregor.’

Mr Wallace frowned. ‘Do you still have it?’

‘On the mantlepiece,’ Raffi said.

Mack turned to see it propped on the shelf above the heater with a stem of grevillea laid beside it. Her blood ran cold. It’d still been on the coffee table when they’d first searched the room before breakfast. The skull’s grin seemed to be mocking them. She threw the others a questioning look: Did you move it there? Raffi shook her head no and Priya kept her eyes on the floor, refusing to acknowledge it at all.

‘How do you know this is Grady’s?’ Mr Wallace asked, crossing the room to pick it up and turning it over in his hands, as though Grady might have put his name on it.

‘Priya saw him,’ Raffi said.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Priya snapped, clearly worried that Raffi was about to reveal she’d been out after curfew.

‘At the bonfire,’ Raffi prompted.

Mr Wallace was starting to look impatient. ‘Which is it, Ms De Sousa?’

‘I don’t know what I saw.’ Priya shrugged, still avoiding eye contact. ‘We had a seance. At the time, we thought it was Smiling Jack.’

Raffi shot daggers at Priya, and Mack was disappointed. Even if Priya believed something paranormal had occurred last night, the mask hadn’t materialised out of nowhere and it was deeply uncool of her to use Smiling Jack as a scapegoat, or rather a scapeghost to keep Grady out of trouble. Sure, Jase and his friends would be pissed if Priya ratted on them, and Mack understood why, as their soon-to-be school captain, Priya couldn’t risk Mr Wallace finding out she’d visited her boyfriend’s lodge last night. But it was still hard not to see it as a betrayal.

‘Sounds to me like you invited trouble,’ Mr Wallace said. ‘I’m confiscating this.’ He held up the mask. ‘And if I were you girls, I’d close the blinds and lock up tight tonight.’

‘The front door lock’s broken,’ Mack said. ‘It was like that when we got here.’

Mr Wallace’s jaw tightened at this revelation. ‘That would have been useful to know yesterday afternoon, Mackenzie.’ He sighed. ‘I’ll call it in to the ranger station. I wouldn’t count on it being fixed before tonight, but from what you’ve told me, the biggest threats you’re facing out here are your own imaginations.’

‘What about Grady?’ Raffi asked.

‘If he admits the mask is his, I’ll deal with him accordingly. In the meantime, I’ll be having a word with the class – I expected more maturity from all of you.’

Mack felt whiplashed. Even if the mask wasn’t Grady’s, it was still proof that someone had been creeping around the lodge while they were sleeping. That was a big deal. A violation. But Mr Wallace seemed convinced she and her friends were at fault for a) allowing it to happen and b) having the audacity to make a fuss by reporting it.

‘Now, while we’re on the topic of unseen entities,’ Mr Wallace continued, oblivious. ‘Is Shelley around or have you scared her off?’

‘Lazybones is still in bed,’ Priya said, looking grateful for the change of topic.

‘She wasn’t feeling well last night,’ Mack clarified. ‘I think she’s going through a hard time.’

‘Well, the sea air will do her good.’ Mr Wallace looked past Mack and asked Priya to point out Shelley’s room, then strode down the hall to hammer on her door. ‘Rise and shine, Ms Martin.’

There was a muffled ‘Coming’ from within, but almost a full minute passed before Shelley opened her door.

‘Jesus, what happened to you?’ Priya said, backing away.

Shelley was still in her pyjamas and stood hugging herself in the doorway, fingers pressing bruises into her arms and her thumbnail moving back-and-forth, back-and-forth, raking scratches on her elbow. Mack couldn’t believe the change in her since they’d said goodnight not two hours before. Her eyes were voids, the pupils blown out the way they would be if she’d been staring at something in the dark for a long time, and her skin shone with fever sweat.

‘My migraine’s worse. I don’t think I can go on the excursion today, Mr Wallace.’

Mr Wallace sniffed the air and frowned. ‘Have you been drinking? Something smells like whisky . . .’

Shelley shook her head.

‘Because if you’ve been drinking –’

‘She hasn’t,’ Mack said, insistent. ‘Look at her, Mr Wallace. She’s sick, not hungover.’

‘I get these headaches with my period,’ Shelley explained. ‘I’ll be fine by tonight if I can lie down in a dark room for a bit.’

Mr Wallace shifted uncomfortably when Shelley dropped the P-bomb. ‘You do seem a bit peaky,’ he conceded. ‘But I don’t like the idea of leaving a student unsupervised. Normally, I’d ask Ms Lim to stay with you, but a ranger drove her and Lachy Smalls to the hospital in Troubridge late last night. Apparently, some of the boys dared Mr Smalls to jump off the roof. And the genius did, if you can believe it.’

Mack could. Lachy Smalls was Kyle Lynton’s shadow, loyal as he was thick. He’d eat literal shit if he thought it’d earn him extra dude-bro points with Kyle.

‘Oh no. Is he okay?’ she asked, voice devoid of concern.

‘He broke his leg, and maybe cracked a few ribs from the way he was carrying on – nothing serious enough to teach him a lesson,’ Mr Wallace said. ‘But he’s a boarder. His parents are on a cruise in Alaska and can’t be reached, so Ms Lim is staying with him and I’m flying solo for the excursion today. Which puts us in a bit of a bind.’

‘I’ll stay with Shelley,’ Mack offered, not relishing the thought of spending the day at Overseer’s, but knowing Shelley needed someone looking out for her.

‘We’ll all stay,’ Raffi added.

Mack expected Priya to chime in with a ‘speak for yourself’, but Priya pulled out her most responsible and trustworthy expression to seal the deal. ‘We’ll take care of her, Mr Wallace. And if anything goes wrong, one of us can stay here with Shelley while the other two go to the ranger’s station for help.’

Mr Wallace, however, wasn’t buying it. ‘More like so the lot of you can get up to who knows what mischief. Not to mention, I’d have a mutiny on my hands if your classmates discovered I’d allowed a whole lodge group to skip our excursion.’

‘Disaster,’ Priya muttered.

‘No,’ Mr Wallace continued. ‘Shelley, if you’re too unwell to join us, I’ll give you permission to stay here, provided you rest and remain in the lodge. Ms Lim should be back soon, and I’ll send her your way. But I meant what I said yesterday; there are wild animals and all manner of rubble throughout the town and it’s not safe to explore on your own.’

‘Thanks, Mr Wallace,’ Shelley said, already shrinking back into her room as though even this minor interaction had exhausted her.

‘You can’t leave Shelley here by herself!’ Mack protested.

Mr Wallace fixed her with a reproachful look. ‘If Shelley’s, uh . . . time of the month is giving her that much trouble, she should be resting, not listening to you lot wind each other up with all this nonsense about ghosts and intruders.’

Mack sucked in a breath, gearing up to give him an earful about neglecting his duty of care and the injustice of leaving Shelley alone and sick because Lachy Smalls was too much of a lapdog to refuse a dare. But Shelley waved her off.

‘I’ll be fine, Mack. Really. I just need to sleep.’

Mack wasn’t convinced, but Mr Wallace checked his watch and herded them away from Shelley’s door.

‘As for the rest of you: hats, sunscreen and drink bottles. Let’s go.’

PRIYA

Priya breathed a deep lungful of salt-sharp air and tilted her face to the sun as they left Overseer’s Lodge. You survived, she told herself. Sure, Grady was going to give her shit for the way she’d freaked out, but shame on him for going after her when she was drunk and vulnerable. And besides, Grady was a terror she could handle. It had been a relief to replay the night’s events in the sober light of day and see that Raffi was right: there was a rational explanation for everything she’d experienced, and the fact that she felt sure she’d witnessed something supernatural was actually further proof that her memory was not to be trusted. The churning unease in her gut was just part of her hangover. Ghosts weren’t real and she had no reason to feel nervous about seeing Jase. He was a good person. He loved her. And she had been mistaken about the thing she had momentarily – in her less-than-reliable state – imagined happened between them.

But her stomach clenched tighter when she saw Jase and the other boys making their way down the hill ahead – no doubt a tactical move to keep Mr Wallace at a safe distance from their beer-fugged lodges. Jase waited until Mr Wallace peeled off to collect the girls in Miner’s Lodge before falling back to sling an arm around Priya’s shoulder.

‘There you are: my little runaway.’

He smelled fresh and clean – his hair still spiked and damp from the shower – and he was wearing Priya’s favourite of his jumpers: a navy crew-neck that highlighted the stormy grey-blue of his eyes. But his arm seemed to weigh her down and Priya resisted the squirmy urge to wriggle free.

‘Where’d you go last night?’ he asked.

I thought I lost you for a minute there.

‘Wasn’t feeling well.’ She shrugged. Grimaced. ‘Figured I’d spare you the pyrotechnics.’

‘Gross.’ He leaned away to look at her. ‘We’re okay though, right? You’re not upset with me?’

We’re okay. You’re not upset. He made the question marks a challenge: Tell me I’ve got it wrong.

She shook her head and forced a smile. ‘Why are you asking, Jase?’

‘No reason.’ He drew her close again and his voice became low and honeyed. ‘I was looking forward to waking up next to you, that’s all. I had this whole plan to bring you coffee and kiss you awake. Maybe keep kissing you . . .’

Mack made a retching sound.

Grady joined her. ‘No one wants to picture you bumping uglies, dude. But I am curious to hear about your evening, ladies,’ he said, waggling his eyebrows at Mack and Raffi’s joined hands. ‘Spare no details.’

God, he could be such a dick.

Priya saw Mack squeeze Raffi’s hand as she rolled her eyes at him. ‘Whatever you’re imagining, withdraw it from your wank bank, Grady. Nothing you see here is in any way for your benefit, nor is it your business. Besides, I reckon you saw more than enough last night.’

Grady laughed, uncertain. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘We found your mask,’ Priya said, Mack’s accusation making her bold. ‘How did Eleni feel about you ditching her to follow me home?’

‘Say what now?’ He seemed genuinely confused.

‘Drop the act, Grady,’ Raffi said. ‘We know you were at the bonfire and creeping around our lodge last night. Also, scummy move chasing Priya and ditching her when she got hurt.’

‘Um, are you girls high?’ He looked between them. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? I jumpscared Priya for a laugh when she came to ours last night, but that was it. Believe it or not, I’ve got better things to do with my time than standing out in the cold watching you girls paint your nails or whatever. Ask Eleni. She was with me all night.’

Priya made a mental note to do just that. Eleni and Georgie were both too small to have been her assailant, but maybe one of them had seen who took the mask.

‘What about the rest of you?’ Mack demanded. ‘Benji? Tom? Resh?’

The boys shook their heads.

Priya’s mouth felt dry. There was one option she hadn’t considered because she was sure she could trust him and that he would never hurt her.

My little runaway.

‘What about you?’ she asked, twisting beneath Jase’s arm to look up at him. ‘Where were you last night?’

Hurt sparked behind his eyes and he lifted his hands in surrender. ‘Whoa. Come on, Pri. You think I, your boyfriend, would try to scare you like that?’

Priya shook her head. She didn’t know what to think.

But Raffi chimed in for her. ‘Billy Loomis said the same thing to Sidney in Scream and – spoiler alert – we all know how that turned out. Welcome to the suspect list, Jase.’

Jase hooked his arm around Priya again and tried to do the Ghostface voice. ‘Sounds like you girls have been watching too many scary movies.’

Priya’s attempt at a smile was even shoddier than his American accent. She hated not knowing who’d followed her last night – who’d seen her at her most vulnerable. And it struck her as odd that none of the boys were owning up to it. Surely they’d want to gloat? But maybe not. Maybe whoever it was realised they’d gone too far.

As the conversation moved on, Jase kept his arm around her and slowed his pace so they fell a little way behind the others.

‘What’s going on with you, Pri? You know that wasn’t me last night, right?’

‘Yeah, I know.’ But did she? She thought she knew Jase better than anyone, but this morning he seemed a stranger.

‘Because you seem sort of pissed,’ he pressed. ‘You haven’t even kissed me good morning.’

She didn’t want to cause a fight, but her heart felt unsteady at the thought of touching him.

‘I’m fine,’ she insisted. ‘But last night wasn’t fun for me, Jase . . .’

She trailed off, leaving him space to acknowledge his part in that. Because if he could admit that he’d done the wrong thing and apologise for it, maybe his arm wouldn’t feel so heavy on her shoulder, and his breath on her neck wouldn’t set insects crawling beneath her skin.

‘I get it,’ Jase assured her, giving her a squeeze. ‘Someone spooked you and you must feel ratshit after that King’s Cup.’ He lowered his voice again. ‘Plus, you’re coming up on your period, right?’

She scrunched her nose. It was weird that he knew that – she hadn’t realised he was keeping such close tabs on those few days each month when she preferred to keep their relationship above the waist – and she resented him dismissing her bad mood as hormones, like a bloody ‘get out of jail free’ card.

‘Why don’t you come around again tonight, and we can spend some real time, just the two of us? No masks or spooky shit, I promise.’

‘I don’t know. I was planning on having a night with the girls.’ She tried to keep her tone light and casual. No big deal that she didn’t want to see him. It wasn’t that she felt anxious at the thought of being with alone him; she just had other plans. ‘Shelley’s sick and it’s been ages since we all hung out.’

His jaw tightened. ‘You can see them anytime, Pri. And your parents are so strict: we might be finished school before we get another chance like this.’

He had a point. But she was no longer sure she wanted that chance.

‘I didn’t get much sleep last night, Jase. I’ll probably crash out right after dinner, but I’ll come if I can.’

Though she didn’t think she would. Or could. Not up that hill in the dark.

‘Sure. Whatever.’

Great. Now he was pissed. Any other day, she’d feel compelled to make things right. Smile and rearrange her plans around his wishes. But that morning, with the night still pressing heavy at her back, the idea of showering him in assurances left her exhausted, and when he stalked ahead to catch up with Grady and the other boys, she let him go.

Mack and Raffi were walking to the side of the group, their heads bent close in earnest conversation. Priya took a few deep breaths until the urge to cry passed then hurried to catch up to them.

‘Whachya whispering about?’ she asked, thumping a heavy hand on each of their shoulders.

Mack shrugged her off, clearly still miffed Priya hadn’t backed her stranger-in-the-house theory with Mr Wallace. ‘Raffi thinks Shelley’s behind the hauntings.’

Shelley. Priya kept forgetting about Shelley. She was sure the figure she’d seen on the path last night was large and male, but she was also drunk at the time. And Shelley was strange. Being around her made Priya uncomfortable. She shuddered, remembering Shelley’s disappearing act at the bonfire: she could move without making a sound.

‘I’m not letting the boys off the hook,’ Raffi clarified. ‘But we can’t rule her out, either. Shelley was the only one of us who spent time alone in the house after the bonfire; she could have left the flowers on our pillows. Plus, she was sitting next to me at the seance when my hair was pulled.’

‘What about the thing in the bathroom?’ Mack said. ‘She was in her room when that happened.’

‘Was she though?’ Raffi asked. ‘It was just the two of you inside at that point; she could have slipped into the bathroom then back to bed before you checked her room. And you and I were asleep when Priya met the ghost on the path – that could have been her, too. She could have sneaked into the boys’ lodge and stolen the mask. I don’t know why she would, but the timing fits. And she could have your bracelet, Mack. Her room is the only place in the lodge we didn’t check. Everything points to Shelley being our ghost.’

Except that Smiling Jack had looked nothing like Shelley.

‘How would she have known that Grady had a mask, or that I’d be coming back to the lodge?’ Priya asked.

‘I’m not sure,’ Raffi admitted. ‘Maybe she saw Grady in the mask at the fire and decided to follow him?’

But was it Grady at the fire? The face Priya had seen was pale – too pale for living human skin – but it hadn’t looked like plastic either. What had she seen? Eyes full of menace. A smile hanging in the dark.

Mack bit her lip. ‘I don’t think Shelley would do a thing like that. We were talking last night and, it’s not my story to tell, but she’s dealing with her own demons. Real ones. Plus, you saw her this morning: she’s sick.’

‘But maybe that’s why she’s doing it,’ Raffi pressed. ‘Do you guys remember Alice Dawes? She was in the year above us, but left partway through Year Nine.’

‘Vaguely,’ Mack agreed. ‘Always wore a scrunchie? Played the flute?’

‘That’s her. She was stage crew for a few drama productions, too. Do you remember why she left?’

There’d been some sort of scandal, Priya recalled. Whispers filtering down to their year, but she hadn’t known Alice and it was ages ago. ‘Was she bullied?’

‘It seemed so,’ Raffi said. ‘Someone kept leaving things in her locker. Clumps of hair. Nail clippings. Used tampons.’

‘Rancid.’ Priya made a face. ‘Someone at our school did this?’

‘Uh-huh. But mostly they wrote her notes, telling her that she was worthless and that she should end things – stop taking up space. No one cared about her anyway. The notes suggested ways she could do it and told her that if she was too chickenshit to follow through, then she should hurt herself – a few scars might at least make her interesting.’

‘Shit, that’s dark,’ Priya said.

‘Yeah, and no one had any idea who was behind it,’ Raffi continued. ‘Alice hadn’t fallen out with anyone, and she was fairly well liked – not weird or popular enough to have a target on her back. And there wasn’t anyone who stood out as capable of being that cruel.’

‘Is that why she left?’ Mack asked. ‘Because the school couldn’t find who was sending the notes?’

Raffi shook her head. ‘She left because they did. Mrs Morley had a security camera installed in the hall, so she could see who was visiting Alice’s locker. But she didn’t tell Alice. Perhaps because she already suspected that the calls were coming from inside the house.’

‘You mean Alice was the one sending the notes?’ Priya asked, incredulous.

‘Yep.’

‘Why?’ Priya couldn’t get her head around it.

But Mack looked thoughtful. ‘Maybe something awful happened to her – maybe she needed help – and it was the only way she felt she could get attention.’

‘And you think Shelley’s doing something similar with Smiling Jack? Freaking us out because she’s freaking out?’ Priya wasn’t convinced.

‘It fits,’ Raffi insisted. ‘She was there when I told his story, and unaccounted for each time he appeared. We’ve been holding seances for years and this is the first time anything truly unsettling has happened. It seems more than a coincidence that a ghost would show up right when Shelley does – two weeks before the end of term, with no explanation.’

Priya wanted to like this theory. It meant she wasn’t hysterical or losing her mind or overreacting: there had been someone trying to freak her out on the hill last night. Someone other than the boys. And if she squinted at it, it almost made sense.

But Mack was shaking her head. ‘I know why Shelley came to Saints. And I know she didn’t do this.’ She seemed both sheepish and spooked, as though she couldn’t quite believe what she was about to say. ‘But I also know that Shelley has a ghost.’

SHELLEY

Shelley waited until the other girls’ voices drifted away down the track before slipping on her sneakers (the floor wasn’t exactly clean) and heading to the kitchen for more Advil. Not that the last dose had done her much good. Her body had been braced against some unseen force ever since arriving in Baynton and she felt both exhausted and hyper-alert, her senses pinging in overdrive and adrenaline flushing hot through her veins. It was Matthew, she was certain. Somehow, instead of ending him, death had made him omnipresent. He had kept her awake the night before, standing over her bed in the dark, letting her feel the heat coming off his body. His awful, looming shape bearing down.

She had hoped telling Mack what he’d done might help. As though if she could convince one person of the truth, she’d be able to get a little more air into her lungs. Relax her aching muscles. Remember that he couldn’t hurt her anymore. But while it was a relief to be listened to, the sense of his presence had only grown stronger.

The floor swayed beneath her feet as she filled a glass at the sink and pressed it to her forehead to cool her fever. Outside, the bush was teeming. Birds cawed and tip-tapped across the roof and bees hummed around snowy heads of common myrtle. But even as Shelley reminded herself that she was far from danger, she saw the spreading gums and tall pines of Weemala Reserve rise up from the low-lying scrub and her head filled with the roar of winter rain.

Time became slippery. Memories drifted in and out of focus, sliding together: Matthew filling her doorway with his athletic frame. Stepping close as her mattress hardened beneath her, becoming sodden tree bark at her back as the rain drummed down around them. His blood was on her lips, a scream in her throat and Gwen Stefani in her ears. Panic gripped her and the migraine-pulse warning that had begun when they arrived the previous afternoon beat starbursts of pain behind her right eye:

GET OUT! GET OUT! GET OUT!

Shelley forced a deep breath and tried to focus. Something was dripping in the sink and her hand that held the glass burned. She lowered it slowly. The glass was broken. Held too tight. Shards cut into her palm, glinting red, and the water mixed with her blood, running in pink veins down her forearm.

She stared at her hand, unable to remember the glass cracking. Or having squeezed it so tight. Where had she found the strength? Dread pooled in her chest. This was bad. Really, really bad. She turned for the first-aid kit, still open on the table, and saw a man walking from the hall towards the back door.

She blinked at him, not trusting her eyes. The man appeared confident and at ease, as though familiar with the lodge, but he was moving silently and she felt sure that he did not intend for her to see him.

‘You’re not supposed to be here,’ she said, her voice low and calm.

The man paused and turned to look at her. He might have been aged anywhere between twenty-five and forty: tall and broad, dressed all in black with his dark hair loose, curling in greasy strands to his shoulders. His face was streaked with whitish powder – gypsum dust – and he’d rubbed charcoal around his eyes and lips to give himself a ghoulish, clowning look. But his expression was blank. A void. If he was surprised by her presence he gave no sign, only lifted a finger to his lips. Our little secret. Shelley watched in horror as his mouth twisted in a wide grin and his eyes remained cold. She knew that smile. Knew that the threat her body had been reacting to wasn’t Matthew. Or a ghost. It was the man from the fire track.

Shelley’s heart became a fist.

She remembered the broken lock on the front door. The vodka that had been waiting on the kitchen table and the flowers on their pillows. The stories of a haunting passed down from year to year. Girls primed to see a figure in the dark that they believed to be a monster of their own making, vulnerable to salt and spells and no more harmful than a dream.

A sound halfway between a strangled laugh and a cry broke in her throat. It had been a mistake to call him out. All those other girls had known better. They’d closed their eyes and resisted the urge to turn on the light. But not Shelley. Despite everything, she still hadn’t learned when to keep her mouth shut.

Her pulse cantered. Oily red blots drifted in a purple haze across her vision and the roar of distant rain filled her ears, but the pain in her cut hand was sharp and pulsing. She clung to it, using it to anchor herself amid the rising tide of panic. She needed to stay calm. In control.

The man tilted his head to the side, sizing her up. His smile spread wider, as though pleased with what he saw, and he made a show of rolling his shoulders and cracking his knuckles: Let’s go, bitch.

With her uninjured hand she grabbed at the drawers behind her, yanking them open in search of a weapon. Her fingers fumbled over teaspoons and forks before coming to rest around the hilt of a knife. She pulled it out. The blade was as long as her forearm and flashed beneath the kitchen light as she raised it before her: a chef’s knife.

‘Stay back.’

She had no intention of stabbing the man – not if she could help it – but from the corner of her eye she saw phantom trees standing tall beyond the window and rain coming down in sheets of red. She needed to get out of the lodge. Get help. And she needed a better weapon, something she could use without putting herself within his arm’s reach. Backing away from him, she spied a blur of red on the wall by the stove. A fire extinguisher. Her old school had mandated an emergency skills course for all Year Ten students. It was supposed to be a boost for their résumés, but now Shelley realised it might actually save her life.

The man was making his way around the table, teasing out his approach, confident in the knowledge she had nowhere to go. She just needed to distract him long enough to get the extinguisher off the wall. Before she could second guess herself, she drew back her arm and hurled the knife at him.

He ducked, as she knew he would, and it hit the wall and clattered to floor behind him. Glee sparked behind his eyes, and in the seconds it took him to retrieve the knife, Shelley wrested the fire extinguisher from the wall, taking its weight in her good hand and pulling the pin with her teeth.

She pivoted in time to see the man rise up, knife in hand. His smile wavered when he realised that she’d tricked him, then disappeared altogether behind a burst of grey cloud. The force of squeezing the extinguisher’s handles together drove the glass shards deeper into her injured hand. Pain and fury broke from her body in a scream. With her remaining strength, she lobbed the extinguisher at the man and sent him reeling backwards. Through the haze, she saw his knees buckle as he hit the bench, and she commanded her legs to run, run, run through the now-empty doorway, out of the house and far away. She didn’t need Raffi’s horror knowledge to understand that a man knocked down is not the same as a man defeated. And she’d given this man a knife.

Right as she reached the back door, some instinct made her glance back, and what she saw chilled her through. The man was already rising. Not rolling onto his side and pushing up on his hands, but lifting his whole torso to a sitting position with core strength alone. He shook his head like a cartoon villain seeing stars after being flattened by an anvil, and grinned up at her from beneath the greasy strands of his hair: Ready or not, here I come.

Outside, the glare was blinding and the day pulsed with unseasonal heat, but that red, red rain was still coming down. Not good. Not good. Not good. Shelley filled her lungs and screamed as she ran for the main track.

‘HELP!’

A murder of crows car-car’d from the trees, mocking her panic and the dusty air burned her throat. She ignored it. Screamed again.

‘SOMEBODY, HELP ME!’

The other girls had left the house ten, maybe fifteen minutes ago, and there was a chance the bus was yet to leave. Even if she missed it, there had to be someone in the town to hear her. A tourist. A ranger. Her heart boomed in her ears, blocking all other sound. She didn’t know how much of a lead she had, but she wouldn’t give an inch of it looking back. She wouldn’t make that same mistake twice. The car park was roughly a kilometre up the track. If the bus was still there, she just had to stay ahead of the man until she reached it. She could do that. She could survive this.

The track was a winking heat shimmer and her vision jumped in the glare. Overhead, the ghosting rain coagulated to drifting red globs in a violet sky. Shelley realised she was crying, struggling to draw air into her lungs through her tears. Go. Go. Go. Her legs were burning and a terrible weight seemed to press against her, so that the harder she pushed, the slower she seemed to move. She focused on the sting of glass pressing against the nerves in her injured hand and the gravel crunching underfoot.

‘HELP ME!”

There were two other girls’ lodges on the main road: Miner’s and Stable Keeper’s. She was certain enough they’d be empty, and that it wasn’t worth the precious seconds it would take to leave the road and hammer on their doors. But she screamed for help as she passed each one, and kept on screaming as her voice wore thin. Until now, the man had been careful to maintain his cover as a ghost – had seemingly been keeping up the pretence for years – and Shelley didn’t think he’d risk coming at her in front of an audience. She needed to find another person. Any person.

Her feet skidded on the gravel as she pushed herself to move faster, and her cries startled mallee fowl and a pair of emus from the surrounding bush before the wind snatched her voice away. She felt her adrenaline running low, her legs beginning to tire and cramp. Waves of feverish heat rolled through her body. But the man’s presence was a magnet tugging at her chest. And he was getting closer.

Don’t let him touch you.

Just don’t let him touch you.

Her breath rasped in her ears and the wind howled her fury overhead. And then, beneath her rage and pain and fear, and near indistinguishable from the chorus of birdcalls, voices carried in the distance. Shelley’s hope flared as she sprinted towards them. The bus hadn’t left. She heard the idling growl of its engine as she panted closer.

‘WAIT!’ she cried. ‘DON’T LEAVE!’

Her voice was raw, the words brittle and splintering in her throat, and the little sound that made it past her lips gusted back towards the town. She didn’t care whether the other Saints thought she was out of her mind or possessed. They could call her whatever names they wanted, so long as she was with them, on the bus and getting the hell out of Baynton.

She gathered what remained of her strength for a final burst of speed and hurled herself towards her classmates’ voices. Just ahead, around the bend. She could see the Gatehouse. See the gate. See – the man stepping into her path to block her way.

Her brain glitched as she staggered back to avoid crashing into him. And into his knife. She didn’t understand how he’d managed to get ahead of her. But it was obvious, wasn’t it?

He was bigger.

Faster.

Running the show.

And he’d had years to familiarise himself with Baynton’s shortcuts and hidey-holes.

Her sneakers slid on the gravel and she went down, landing hard on her elbow and tailbone. She cried out as pain rocketed up her arm and spine, and somewhere behind the man, the bus grumbled into gear.

‘NO! WAIT!’ she screamed again, but her voice was a rasp and the wind still beat against her, sending up a howl of its own. Her cry became a whimper; there was no chance of being heard.

The man smiled and the shadows of pine trees fell across his face as the sound of the bus’s engine grew fainter.

No, no, no.

This could not be happening. Not to her. Not after what she’d already survived.

The man raised the knife and started towards her.

Darkness speckled the edges of her vision.

Don’t let him touch you.

Don’t let him get close.

Gravel raked her forearms as she scrabbled back and twisted onto her knees. Onto her feet. She could hardly see through her tears. Through the blood. Through the rain. But no. That was then, with Matthew. Focus.

Even in her panic, she felt the lost night of sleep slowing her down, fear stitching up her movements, making her clumsy. She looked back to see the man had closed half the small distance between them, walking with steady, purposeful strides. There was no need to hurry; he knew how this ended.

But his smile told her that they were going to have some fun in the meantime.

The pain in her glassed hand was a pulsing omen. Her back and elbow throbbed. She wasn’t going to be able to outrun him. Not in her injured, feverish state. And she wasn’t about to pick a fight with his knife. That left one option: hide. If she could keep out of sight long enough to make it to the park’s main road, she still stood a chance.

She veered right, crashing at a diagonal through the scrub, hoping to catch the man off guard and buy herself precious seconds. The town’s ruins jutted from the bush either side of her. A sign warned hikers to keep to the paths, but Shelley would take her chances. She dodged hunks of crumbled brick and twists of rusted wire snaking through the grass as she scouted for a place to hide.

To her right, the town’s former post office had been fixed up as another accommodation lodge complete with a small, picket-fenced yard, while to her left lay the old general store, schoolhouse and bakery – their rooms open to the sky. The post office was out; it only had one door and, even if that happened to be unlocked, she didn’t want to back herself into a confined space with her assailant. Ahead of her, cleared land soft with native grasses sloped down towards the distant tree line screening the lake.

Shelley glanced back to see that the man had followed her off the path, but he, too, was having to watch his step, and navigating the uneven ground had added distance between them. She ducked behind the two walls and chimney that had once been the general store and, moving at a crouch, scurried across to the old school building to wedge herself deep into a stand of bushes that had grown around one of the walls. She had barely managed to conceal herself before she heard footsteps crunching close.

From where she squatted, she saw the man enter the general store and cock his head, puzzled. His eyes flashed with delight: he liked this game. Shelley watched him pantomime checking the store’s few hiding spots before slashing at a tall thicket of weeds in one corner. Until that moment, his movements had been slow, almost playful, making the force and fury of the attack all the more shocking. Shelley felt a jolt each time he brought down the blade and bit her cheeks hard enough to draw blood to keep from crying out. The man hacked at the weeds until anyone hiding there would have been dingo food, then straightened up and slowly, deliberately – clownish smile still in place – turned to fix his gaze on the bushes where Shelley hid.

Her terror kicked into a higher gear and her vision shuddered, beating time with her rabbiting heart. Before she could think what to do, her body was already moving, crawling soundlessly along the wall behind the screen of foliage towards the bakery, while keeping her bloodied hand pressed against her pyjama top to avoid leaving a trail as the man strode towards her hiding place.

The bakery was better preserved than the other buildings. Time had eaten away the roof, but the walls of its two rooms still stood. Shelley crawled through a splintered doorframe into what must have been a back office or storeroom – small and bare – and kept moving into the larger second room where the bakery’s oven remained intact.

Behind her, the crunch of footfalls on dry grass was replaced by the ringing echo of boots on concrete. She glanced around in panic. The room’s other door opened onto the expanse of native grass separating the town from the lake. If she went that way, she’d be stuck in the open and the man would run her down. If she was going to hide – to survive – it had to be in that room and it had to be now.

The answer came in a flash of fairytale wisdom. Tucked into the corner, on the far side of the room opposite the oven, was a blackened fireplace, its chimney too narrow for a man, but wide enough for a girl. Reaching her frantic hands into the webby dark, Shelley felt for the smoke shelf. For a terrible half-second, there was only air and she worried it had crumbled away. But then she reached a little higher and her fingers slapped against a narrow ledge of cool, sooted brick. She swallowed her relief and focused on hauling herself up. Her injured hand was on fire, her sneakers scuffed near-useless against the brick and the muscles in her arms felt ready to snap with the effort of hoisting her weight. But she managed to get her bum onto the ledge and pull her feet clear of the hearth. Then she braced against the side of the chimney to pull herself to stand.

Below, the man’s footsteps rang out slow and deliberate, then stopped. Shelley sensed him glancing around, confused, and she held very still. A white-noise storm roared in her ears and the reek of Covet wound itself around her. Nausea roiled in her gut.

Just don’t let him touch you.

The man was moving again, walking the room’s perimeter. Tapping the point of the knife against the wall.

Tk. Tk. Tk. Tk.

Where. Could. She. Be?

Shelley concentrated on matching her breathing to his steps, willing herself to become one with the dark. From her cramped position on the smoke shelf, all she could see of the room below was the blacked-out hearth and a thin strip of sun-bleached concrete, marred by a single splodge of blood. Her blood.

Shit. Oh shit.

As she watched, the toe of one dusty boot, then another, appeared either side of the stain. Shelley’s heart thundered. A hand reached down and touched the spot. And then the man’s awful, grinning face appeared in the hearth. Shelley froze. Watched in horror as he lifted his bloodied index finger to his mouth and licked it clean. She swallowed the urge to be sick and squeezed her eyes shut, lest they catch the shine of light filtering up from below.

He hasn’t seen you. He can’t see you.

There was a sudden disturbance of air as the knife slashed close by her ankles. She bit down a cry and ballerina’d her feet to keep them from sticking over the ledge. Her spine pressed so hard against the chimney wall that they seemed to fuse together. The brick was rough as tree bark and she took sips of air as the knife slashed again and again, missing her toes but stirring up dust and decades’-old soot. It got into her nose. Made her want to sneeze. Her body shook with the effort of tamping it down. And just when she was sure she couldn’t keep it in, movement exploded around her. The dark was screeching, full of feathers. A talon snagged in her hair and Shelley bit back a scream as panicked wings beat against her face and the thing pecked and clawed at her scalp in an effort to free itself.

She swatted wildly with her good hand, trying to bat it away, and swallowed a new wave of nausea as her knuckles connected with a feathered chest. Tiny bones. A fear-struck heart. She watched in horror as the small bird, who must have made its nest high in the chimney, tumbled down into the light. Her slap had stunned it, and it landed at an angle, breaking its neck on the hearth below. One of its wings slapped uselessly against the brick and stilled. The man watched, too. He’d pulled back when the bird started flapping, but now the toe of one boot reappeared.

In all that time he hadn’t said a word.

So much scarier that way.

Shelley forced slow, silent breaths to calm her heart, her eyes fixed on the broken bird as she waited for the knife to come again. Or for the man’s hands to reach into the dark, clamp around her ankles and drag her screaming into the light. She imagined him lifting her by her hair to crack her head against a corner of brick. Making her death appear accidental. As though she’d fallen while exploring. A girl out of bounds asking for trouble.

She waited one minute. Two.

The man’s boot retreated from view. Exaggerated footsteps stomped back towards the door. But Shelley didn’t trust them. She could still feel the tug of the man’s presence, and, in her mind’s eye, she saw him position himself in the corner, terrible grin in place, ready to greet her when she believed she was safe. Whenever that might be.

RAFFI

Raffi didn’t like the idea of leaving Shelley in Baynton for the day. A ghost town was no place for a haunted girl. Even if Shelley was the one pretending to be Smiling Jack – perhaps especially if it was her – she needed people around to care for her. Mr Wallace should have cancelled the excursion. Most of their classmates had shuffled up to the bus looking like extras in a George Romero film, and Raffi was willing to bet they all would’ve taken a sleep-in over the maritime history lectures Mr Wallace had in store.

Their first stop in the day’s itinerary of shipwrecks, lighthouses and sailors’ graves was the Cape Henning Lighthouse. It was perched at the edge of a narrow bluff shaped like a crooked finger pointed at the sea. The path leading up from the car park was long and steep with a sheer drop down to the rocks and seething swell on either side, and a sign warned parents to keep kids away from the edge in high winds.

‘Seems safe,’ Priya muttered.

Despite their fight the night before, and despite letting them down with Mr Wallace that morning, Priya had now attached herself to Raffi and Mack as though everything was sweet between them. Raffi resented it when Priya did this, reshaping reality to smooth things over rather than acknowledging a problem. But the way she was pointedly not looking at Jase all but confirmed Raffi’s suspicions that something had soured there – something that could not be imagined away – and that Priya needed their support. Even if she was too proud to ask for it.

Around them, the other Saints trudged towards the lighthouse, hats tugged low and expressions grim beneath their sunnies, and Raffi noticed that Priya and Jase weren’t the only ones avoiding eye contact. Mr Wallace, meanwhile, seemed almost invigorated by their lack of enthusiasm, reeling off facts about shipping lanes, fishing regulations and the automation of the peninsula’s lighthouse system as he handed out worksheets for them to complete.

‘He’s loving this,’ Mack whispered. ‘A million bucks says he planned the whole day as a punishment for anyone who dared to have fun last night.’

‘The eight am call time was a cruel touch,’ Raffi agreed.

When they arrived at the lookout, she, Mack and Priya found themselves a spot to sit against the lighthouse, out of the wind and Mr Wallace’s sight. Small islands crouched against the horizon, their lighthouses slow-blinking at the shore through the haze, and waves foamed in fury over hidden reefs. Raffi found herself looking back along the cliff towards the car park and thinking how a person could take one wrong step out here and the sea would swallow them whole. She wished Ms Lim had been the one to stay with them. As their Art teacher, she’d most likely have them sketching the native plants and wildlife and learning about the older history of the land and what it meant to the Indigenous people who had called it home for tens of thousands of years.

Mack nudged her shoulder. ‘You okay?’

‘Yeah, just processing,’ Raffi said. ‘Last night sort of spun me around.’

‘Are you having second thoughts?’

Priya developed a sudden, intense interest in Mr Wallace’s droning and frowned over her worksheet as though it were an end of year exam, giving them space while continuing to avoid eye contact with Jase.

Raffi looked at Mack – at her girlfriend – and her heart fizzed just thinking the word. She wanted to kiss away Mack’s uncertainty and lead her someplace private where she could take her time showing Mack exactly how much she wanted this new thing between them. But it would have to wait.

‘Not about us,’ she assured Mack. ‘It’s Smiling Jack. Even though I know it had to be one of the boys or Shelley in the mask, something about it doesn’t add up. Why put all that time and effort into scaring us? It went way beyond a joke, so what did they get out of it?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mack said. ‘But I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of ruining the rest of Retreat for us. I vote that tonight we eat a shit-ton of junk food, play music, do a jigsaw puzzle and sleep for eight hours straight.’

Raffi grinned. ‘Sounds perfect, Granny Whitmore.’

‘With you, it will be, Nonna Vecchio.’ Mack took her hand, and Raffi instinctively glanced around to see if anyone noticed.

Mack let her go. ‘Grady was out of line this morning, Raf. Most people won’t be like that.’

‘I know, but do you think Mr Wallace will let us spend another night under the same roof if he finds out we’re together?’

It was a weak excuse and Mack looked disappointed. ‘Neither of us is going home pregnant, so I reckon that puts us way down on his list of concerns.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Are you ready to be Us, Raf?’

Raffi considered her classmates, wondering if and how things might change once she and Mack went public. She knew most would be happy for them, or at least indifferent. And the few who might give them a hard time weren’t worth her tears. But there was one person who would be crushed by the news, especially if it didn’t come from Raffi.

Sy was standing with a group of their theatre friends by one of the information plaques. Daisy Mortimer had rolled her worksheet into a telescope and nudged him to say something, but he didn’t seem to hear. He looked wistful, dark hair dancing in the wind, and his cheeks flushed when he saw Raffi looking. Jase was close by, balancing on the railings’ bottom rung and yelling at the wind with his arms stretched wide, like he was Jack Dawson from Titanic. The wind roared in reply, knocking Jase off balance and he staggered back doing a funny little quick step to keep from falling.

Raffi smiled before she could catch herself, and Sy smiled back. Warm. Hopeful. He pushed off from the rail and started to make his way over, and, oh God, she had to tell him. Raffi felt hot all over, her throat closing up and the words she needed dissolving on her tongue. But then Daisy was tugging him away to point out a pod of dolphins in the water below.

Mack touched her arm. ‘Raf?’

Raffi realised she was rubbing the heel of her hand over her heart-space, as though trying to work out a knot.

‘There’s something I need to do, Mack. Give me the day, then I’m all yours.’

It took her until late afternoon to work up the courage to talk to Sy. By that point they’d visited more lighthouses and salt lake quarries, eaten lunch beneath the rotted jetty pilons of the region’s former port, endured a kilometres-long clifftop bushwalk and arrived, bored and exhausted, at Karlina Beach, their final stop for the day.

The small cove was hugged by tall cliffs and named for the Norwegian ship that had been en route to Port Adelaide when it wrecked off the coast in 1904 and remained rusting in the sand. Everything on the beach felt outsized. The cliffs crowded out the sun, making Raffi shiver, and the surf boomed. Long, barrel waves curled down the shore, foam and spray seething in their wake. She imagined wading into the swell and a receding wave snatching her by the ankles, pulling her under and away. It made her feel tiny and hollow-boned.

Her classmates moved crab-like over the wreck, pocketing souvenirs of flaking metal and writing their names on the rocks with cuttlefish bones. Sy stood apart from the others by the water at the edge of the cove. He had his video camera and was filming the waves. He wanted to be a movie director and was always recording. Instead of mix CDs, he’d made Raffi moving collages. Moments caught and stitched into little dreams that he shared with her. Many of their classmates, including their theatre friends, gave him shit about his camera. But Raffi knew he had a good eye and a point of view. She believed that, with luck on his side, he could make it. Even if he didn’t, she liked that he had the courage to go all-in. She was going to miss the long evenings they spent discussing books and films and plays and imagining the things they might make. And she hoped they would one day gain that back, as friends. But they were a long way from that now and her stomach felt foamy, unsettled as the sea, as she screwed up her courage and made her way over to him.

‘Hey,’ she said softly, leaving a careful space between them.

He switched off the camera and the wind blew his hair across his cheek as he turned to look at her. ‘Hey.’

‘Can we talk?’

‘Unless you’ve changed your mind about us, this is the part where you give me space to get over you, Raf.’ He studied her face, his hazel eyes flecked gold in the afternoon light. ‘And you haven’t changed your mind, have you?’

‘No.’ Her mouth felt dry. Gritty and full of sand instead of words. ‘But I need to explain. About why I ended things between us.’

He nodded gravely and stared back at the swell. ‘It’s my taste in music, isn’t it? You can’t love a man who loves Savage Garden.’

She bit down a smile; she’d miss his sense of humour, too. ‘It would be a challenge,’ she admitted.

‘Then let’s leave it at that. I’m not up for critical feedback right now.’

‘It’s not you,’ she assured him. ‘I don’t want to hurt you more than I already have, Sy, but you need to hear this from me.’

‘Sounds ominous.’

Raffi drew up her courage and made herself look at him while she spoke the words. ‘There’s someone else.’

Sy stared out at the waves while he processed this. Raffi couldn’t tell if he was angry or sad, but his jaw was clenched tight, as though he were trying not to cry. It made her want to put her arms around him, though she knew that would only make it worse.

‘It’s Mack, isn’t it?’ he said after a moment.

‘You don’t seem surprised.’

He shrugged a little, shook his head. ‘I think, maybe, I already knew? The whole time we were together, I never felt I had your full attention. And I kept waiting for you to look at me the way you look at her.’

Raffi’s heart cracked deeper. Her eyes were hot and her vision starred. ‘I’m really sorry, Sy. I like you – that was always true – and I thought we could make it work.’

He managed a wincing smile. ‘Poor form, Ms Vecchio.’

She nodded, blinking back tears. This was harder than she’d imagined.

‘But I’m happy for you and Mack,’ he said, touching her hand. ‘I mean, it’s not ideal. For me. And I wish you’d told me sooner, like before I fell in love with you. But I’m glad you figured it out, because one of us needed to be brave and I don’t know that I had it in me.’

Raffi twined her fingers with his, knowing it was the last time. ‘Will you be okay?’

‘Not right away, but eventually – yes. And I appreciate you telling me, Raf.’ He squeezed her hand before letting go. ‘Now fuck off so our single classmates can admire me brooding handsomely at the sea.’

Raffi had every intention of giving him his space but, as she turned to make her way back across the beach to where Mack and Priya were attempting to sun their legs on the lower rocks, she caught sight of a dark-clad figure grinning down from the clifftop car park. His appearance was so unexpected that she gave a startled cry.

‘What is it?’ Sy turned to see what she was looking at, brow creased with concern.

‘That man on the clifftop. Do you see him?’

‘The pale guy in black?’ Sy gave her an odd look. ‘Yeah, I see him. Why is he smiling like that? Do you know him?’

Raffi shook her head and squinted, trying to make out the man’s features. Pale, with punched-out eyes. A ghost in broad daylight. And Sy could see him too. It didn’t make sense. Even if Smiling Jack were real, he was supposed to haunt Overseer’s Lodge. It was only in her version of the legend that he appeared at the beach. The wind gusted up, chilling her through. ‘Can I borrow your camera?’

Sy looked confused, but handed it over.

Raffi hit record and aimed the lens at the cliff, zooming in to pan across the length of the car park and back again. Except she couldn’t locate the man in the viewfinder. She frowned and lowered the camera. The cliff edge was empty.

‘How do I play this back?’

Sy showed her how to rewind the footage and watch it on the little flip-out screen, but the man didn’t appear on the film.

‘I don’t get it. You saw him. He was standing by the bus, staring right at us.’ An insect buzz of panic was rising in her chest. Had whoever was up there been listening at the bonfire the night before? Was it him, not Shelley, who’d scared Mack and Priya? Had he been inside their lodge? And was he still there when they left Shelley alone this morning?

‘He looked like a creep,’ Sy said. ‘Who was that, Raf?’

She shook her head, her thoughts racing.

‘Someone who doesn’t belong here.’

MACK

The light had turned from honeyed to fire when the bus delivered the Saints back to Baynton. Mack’s shoulders tensed as they filed through the gate. Touring the park’s sun-buttered coastline, she’d almost been able to put the previous night’s shadows from her mind. But now they came creeping from their hiding spots and she felt a rising dread at the thought of enduring a second night in Overseer’s Lodge.

Beside her, Raffi seemed equally apprehensive. She’d barely spoken a word since they left Karlina Beach, staring out the bus window during the short drive back and worrying the little silver crucifix at her throat. Mack wasn’t about to stick her nose in there, but she guessed her conversation with Sy hadn’t gone well. She wondered, too, whether Raffi was worried about going home. Perhaps, for her, the ghost had been a welcome distraction.

‘You know you’re always welcome to stay at mine when we get back,’ she told Raffi as they waited for Priya to catch them up. ‘My parents won’t mind.’

‘They . . . what?’ Raffi blinked back to the present and cut Mack a sideways look. ‘You don’t want to give this a few dates before reassessing our living arrangements?’

‘I just meant that if it’s hard at home, you have a place and, regardless of what happens with us, you can stay as long as you need.’

‘I know what you meant.’ Raffi slipped her arm around Mack’s waist, pressing herself close. ‘And I appreciate it. I want to give my parents another chance – I have to believe that their love is stronger than their fear. But I might also need space from them while they get there.’

‘Are you nervous about seeing them?’ Mack asked.

Raffi shrugged. ‘They’ve already served up the worst they’re going to give. Right now, I’m more worried about Shelley. I think I was wrong about her being the ghost.’ She cast a wary glance along the track. ‘We shouldn’t have left her alone today. I want to get back to the lodge and make sure she’s okay.’

‘We can cut a few minutes off the walk if we take the path closer to the lake,’ Priya chimed in, already holding her map as she cleared the bottleneck at the gate. Mack suspected her main objective in taking the shorter path was to avoid Jase – whatever that was about – but as reluctant as Mack was to return to the lodge, she was worried about Shelley, too. Looking up, she saw the first stars prickling overhead and shivered in her hoodie; they needed to hurry if they wanted to make it back before dark.

The shorter path was narrower – a historic walking trail that threaded through the scrubby pasture between the ruins and the lake before meeting up with the main track just before Overseer’s Lodge. The old buildings they passed cast strange shadows and kangaroos stood tall and silent in the long grass, following her with their dark-eyed gaze. Mack stayed close to Raffi and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. It might have been the faster route, but it didn’t feel that way.

‘Hold up. What’s that?’

Mack startled at the sound of Priya’s voice.

‘What’s what?’ she asked, glancing up to get her bearings. With relief, she saw that they’d come further than she’d thought and were rounding the wide bend that arced around to the main path. The fire track was already behind them and the turn-off to Overseer’s was just up ahead.

‘That gap in the trees.’ Priya frowned at her map. ‘It isn’t marked – it must be an old driveway or something – but I reckon it might come out near the fire pit at the back of our lodge.’

Mack squinted where she was pointing and saw an older path winding off the gravel track towards Overseer’s. It was grassy and overgrown, almost obscured by the encroaching trees and scrub on either side, save where a pair of recent tyre tracks had flattened the grass.

‘How did we miss this?’ Raffi said, starting towards it.

Mack caught her arm. ‘We’re not supposed to go into the bush. There might be snakes, Raf. Or we could get lost – why would we risk that when the actual path is literally around the corner. Besides,’ she said, nodding up at the bruised sky, ‘it’s almost dark and we don’t have our torches.’

‘Scaredy cat,’ Priya teased, stepping past them. ‘It’s too cold for snakes. And the lodge is just up there. Look! Shelley’s got the kitchen light on. I’m starving. It’d be ace if she’s started dinner.’

A faint light glowed through the greying trees, not more than thirty-odd metres away.

Mack relaxed a little. If Shelley was up and about, that was something at least.

Priya picked up a long stick and swished it through the grass as she walked, singing TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ to scare off curious wildlife, and startling a murder of crows from a nearby tree.

Raffi shook her head. ‘Criminal she didn’t make the choir.’

She caught Mack’s hand, holding her back as Priya disappeared into the bush ahead.

‘Hi,’ she said softly, reaching up to cup Mack’s face. It was the first time they’d been alone all day.

Stars sparked in Mack’s chest and she flushed with their heat as she touched her forehead to Raffi’s. ‘Hi.’

They kissed, lips cool and salty with the evening chill.

‘You taste like the sea,’ Mack whispered.

Raffi scrunched her nose.

‘I meant it as a compliment,’ Mack assured her.

Raffi shook her head: not what she meant. ‘Listen.’

They fell silent and Mack felt Raffi’s pulse beat fast below her jaw.

Priya had stopped singing.

‘Priya?’ Raffi called.

There was no response.

‘Priya!’ Mack started running as she called her name, Raffi following a half-step behind.

They spotted her frozen a dozen or so metres ahead, seemingly unharmed but staring fixedly at something to the side of the path obscured by a large bush.

‘Is it a snake?’ Mack whispered, unsure why she was lowering her voice or why she suddenly hoped that it was a snake. Maybe because she’d never seen Priya look so rattled. So outright terrified. And because she desperately wanted the source of that terror to be something she knew how to deal with.

Priya shook her head with trance-like slowness. No. Not a snake. Her chest hitched with shallow, panicked breaths and her mouth wilted in a frightened ‘O’ as she lifted a hand to point.

‘Look.’

Raffi and Mack hurried to meet her. The path grew visibly more overgrown where she’d stopped. She must have been casting around to find the way when she saw what had frightened her: a dinged-up ute with no licence plates parked between the bushes. Someone had done a slapdash job of painting it army green and patches of rust were speckling through. The tray was empty, but brownish stains hinted at heavy use.

Mack swallowed hard, unable to take her eyes from those stains. ‘It’s just an old car, Pri. The town is full of this sort of junk.’

‘There’s air in the tyres,’ Raffi said, her voice tense.

‘Maybe it belongs to a ranger.’

But even as she said it, Mack knew that wasn’t right. Park rangers didn’t make their rounds in unregistered, spray-painted utes. And they didn’t hide their work vehicles in the scrub near high schoolers’ accommodation. At least, they shouldn’t.

‘No.’ Priya was still shaking her head. ‘Look.’

Raffi and Mack followed her finger to where she was pointing. The last rays of sun glowed red through the ute’s back window to illuminate a string of beads hanging from the rear-view mirror, their rainbow colours glinting in the dying light.

Mack stared at her bracelet, her brain scrabbling to make sense of what it was doing in the strange car. At first, she felt relieved – it wasn’t lost, after all! She must have dropped it – maybe at the bonfire – and the car’s owner had picked it up. But you were wearing it when you went to bed, and it was gone when you woke up, a voice reminded her. She shushed it away and started towards the car, but Raffi stopped her.

‘Don’t.’ Her face had paled. Her mouth was set in a tense line and her nails dug into Mack’s arm where she gripped her. ‘He’ll know we found it.’

It took Mack a second to follow. Her thoughts cycled back to the deep dark of her room the night before. Her stomach lurched as she remembered the gentle brush of fingertips across her cheek and saw the dark lift to reveal not Raffi, but a strange, grinning man beside her in the bed. She imagined him using his teeth to gnaw through the bracelet’s purple yarn, taking what she valued most. Her vision spun dark and she sank to her knees to vomit in the grass.

Raffi knelt beside her, holding back her hair and rubbing reassuring circles on her back until she was done.

‘Mack, look at me.’ Her voice was reassuring but firm, and when Mack looked up, she saw a change had come over Raffi. She seemed weirdly calm, given the circumstances. ‘Smiling Jack scares girls on Retreat every year.’

A sob broke from Mack’s throat.

‘No, it’s okay,’ Raffi assured her. ‘He scares people, but he’s never hurt anyone. That’s how he gets away with it – by making sure there’s no way to prove he exists. So long as he doesn’t find out what we know, it’ll be all right.’ She began scraping together fistfuls of leaves to cover Mack’s sick.

Mack felt she was watching her at a great distance. This couldn’t be real.

‘He was inside our house, Raffi! He was in my bed. He – he touched me.’ Her teeth were chattering so hard, she could barely get the words out.

‘We need to tell Mr Wallace,’ Priya said, recovering her voice. ‘The teachers have a satellite phone for emergencies. We can call the police.’

‘What about Shelley?’ Raffi said. ‘We can’t leave her at the lodge while we go for help. We shouldn’t have left her alone in the first place.’

‘Then we split up. You and Mack check on Shelley and I’ll get Mr Wallace.’

‘By yourself? In the dark? It’s a ten-minute hike, Priya,’ Raffi reminded her. ‘No. No one’s going anywhere alone. That was our mistake last night. We don’t know who this guy is or where he’s hiding out, but we stand a better chance against him if he has to contend with us as a group. So here’s the plan: we get Shelley and our torches from the lodge, then the four of us go to the teachers’ lodge and report this guy.’

Mack forced herself to stand, leaning on Raffi. Her legs still felt wobbly and she didn’t like any scenario that meant going back to Overseer’s or walking through the dark. The man, Smiling Jack, might be waiting inside. For all they knew, he was watching them at that moment. But Raffi was right: they couldn’t go for help without Shelley.

She turned back to the ute, watching as the dark closed like a fist around her bracelet. ‘I’m scared, Raf.’

‘Me too.’ Raffi squeezed her hand. ‘But if we’re going to get through this, we need to be brave.’

RAFFI

Raffi had studied the art of survival. By her fourteenth birthday she had marathoned her way through most of the golden age slashers and knew that the monster couldn’t hurt you as long as you obeyed the Big Daddy Golden Rule of Rules: your life and your body are your responsibility. Be prepared and stay alert at all times. Because once that first drop of blood is spilled, danger is everywhere, and you have been warned.

Of course, following the rule is easier said than done because everything in a horror film conspires to make you break it. You’ll be tempted to answer a knock at the door or pick up the phone when you’re home alone. Your beloved dog will go missing. The night will be full of strange noises that want investigating. And when the bodies start piling up, someone will throw a big party with free-flowing booze. The music will pump, the temperature will rise and your long-held crush will want to kiss you in the dark. And, finally, when your friends are all dead and you’re exhausted and bleeding and terrified, you’ll want to give up and let the killer take what they came for. There’s only one character who can stay the course until sunrise. Sometimes it’s a boy, but more often it’s a girl: the Final Girl.

At the age when men and boys had started to look at her in ways that made Raffi uncomfortable, Final Girls became her idols. She imagined that if she could be more like them – slim and WASPy, straight but unavailable – if she wore flattering-but-modest clothes and shoes she could run in and turned down party invites to babysit on Friday nights, and if she always knew where the exits were, never spoke to strangers and was indoors before dark, she, too, could survive a monster.

But that all fell apart on 31 October, 1998. Twenty years after their last showdown in Haddonfield, Laurie Strode and Michael Myers were gearing up for a family reunion, and Raffi couldn’t wait. She’d dragged Mack and Priya to the midnight premier screening of Halloween H20 at the Marion Megaplex Senstadium and made them line up with her three hours early to snag prime seats. But the film was a disappointment. Her long-time hero had become a paranoid alcoholic living in constant fear of her brother’s return. And as Michael’s ominous theme played over the credits, Raffi felt silly for missing what was so clear to all the masked horror nerds at that screening: the rules don’t matter because the game is rigged. Michael Myers. Jason Voorhees. Freddy Krueger. Ghostface. Pennywise. Candyman. They are who the audience come to see. Even if you beat the odds, fighting your way through sequels and reboots, you’ll still be stuck in the monster’s story. So the monster always wins.

Raffi found this unacceptable. She was worth more than a bit part in a B-grade franchise. When she saw Mack’s stolen bracelet hanging from the ute’s rear-view mirror she felt no fear, only rage. Clear, focused rage. She had blown up her life to be with Mack. Retreat was supposed to be the story of their beginning. The story of how she, Raffi, stopped hiding and stepped fully and unapologetically into herself. How dare this man – this stranger – overshadow that. How dare he recast them as his victims. She would not be reduced to a grainy school photo in a newspaper article with his name in the title. Hell, she’d never speak his name again. He was just a man, no caps, and this was their story, not his.

In that moment, with the dark closing in, Raffi promised herself three things. Number one: she, Mack and Priya would see tomorrow’s sunrise. Two: if something had already happened to Shelley, they would make sure it was her name that the world remembered. And three: they would move past this coming night. In twenty years’ time they would not be living in fear. She balled her hand into a fist: no sequels.

The night lay thick around them when they reached the lodge. The kitchen light was still on, but there was no movement and the rest of the house was dark and silent.

‘I don’t like this,’ Priya whispered.

Raffi didn’t either. It was a classic horror-movie bind. Entering the lodge felt like a trap, but they couldn’t leave Shelley behind.

‘I’ll go first. Keep behind me and watch your backs.’

She steeled herself and tried the back door: unlocked. It creaked as she pulled it open and felt for the light switch inside the door. The mudroom was as they’d left it: tidy and benign.

‘Shelley?’ she called.

No reply.

‘SHELLEY?’

‘Maybe she’s sleeping?’ Mack whispered, her voice thin and frightened.

Raffi started towards the hall to check, but stopped when she saw the state of the kitchen.

‘Oh shit.’

‘What? What is it?’ Priya was at her shoulder, trying to see past.

The room was in disarray. A chemical haze drifted over everything. Drawers had been yanked open, the contents of the first-aid kit were scattered across the table and the fire extinguisher lay on its side against a cupboard.

‘What happened in here?’ Mack whispered. ‘Jesus, is that blood?’

Raffi followed Mack’s gaze to the dark splodges on the floor by the sink, and the corpse reveals from a dozen slasher movies played through her head.

‘Shelley!’ she called. ‘Shelley!’

‘I’ll check her room,’ Priya offered.

Raffi stayed with Mack, worried she might be sick again. She seemed unsteady, moving slowly around the room, taking it all in. Raffi was still trying to make sense of it, too. Something about the scene felt . . . staged. The light, she realised. He’d left the light on. Directing their focus. He wanted them to see this and know they were in danger.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ she cautioned Mack. ‘It’s evidence.’

Mack looked up from inspecting the open drawers, stricken.

‘There’s a knife missing.’

Fear flooded Raffi’s chest. ‘Are you sure?’

‘There should be a chef’s knife in here.’ Mack nodded at the cutlery drawer. ‘I used it to make dinner last night and put it away after I dried the dishes. Now it’s gone.’

‘He used it in here,’ Priya called. Her voice was flat, which was somehow worse than if she’d sounded frightened.

Raffi gripped Mack’s hand as they hurried to Shelley’s room. Priya was inside, standing by the bed. At first glance, the room looked untouched, with the contents of Shelley’s duffel spilling onto the floor, her sleeping bag laid over the mattress and a book and a glass of water on the bedside table. Raffi had been braced for blood. A body. The man himself lying in wait. And she hiccupped with relief. But then she saw Shelley’s pillow. The floral-patterned case had been repeatedly slashed and bits of stuffing lay scattered all around.

It was such a cartoonish gesture that it might have been funny if what it implied for Shelley wasn’t so frightening. Mack whimpered beside Raffi and her grip was tight and slick on Raffi’s hand. Raffi wanted to reassure her, but the danger was real and present.

‘What does it mean?’ Priya asked, still staring at Shelley’s pillowcase.

Raffi swallowed her rising dread. ‘He’s been waiting for us.’

And that’s when the lights cut out.

Mack and Priya screamed in the sudden dark. Raffi wanted to scream, too – scream and howl and rage – but houselights down meant the show was about to begin and they needed to be ready.

She forced a calming breath and considered what they knew about their assailant. Shelley’s butchered pillow was shocking, but also schlocky. As were the ‘hauntings’. The man was a performer – a failed actor maybe. Or a clown. And he was playing out horror tropes; he knew the genre. Knew Raffi’s generation were coming-of-age with Kevin Williamson’s slick, self-aware slashers and that The Blair Witch Project had every kid with a camcorder believing they could be the next big thing in Hollywood. He knew that excitable girls panicking over a missing knife and a killer on the loose would not be taken seriously. He also seemed to have no trouble moving around in the dark. Raffi bet he was using something to help him see, like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. She remembered the way Priya had described his features. Such black eyes. Maybe he had taken something to dilate his pupils? Something that added to his ghostly look. Her gaze flicked to the place she knew the window to be. If she was right, he could be standing on the other side of the glass looking in. The thought chilled her through.

‘Hallway. Now,’ she whispered to Priya and Mack, feeling for their hands in the dark. ‘Stay close.’

‘Oh God, he’s coming inside, isn’t he?’ Priya sobbed.

‘How do we get out?’ Mack asked, voice tight with panic.

‘We don’t,’ Raffi replied. ‘Not yet.’

They’d put the couch back across the front door before they left Shelley that morning and Raffi had seen that it was still there when she and Mack made their way to Shelley’s room. The man – whoever he was – would need to use the back door or a window to get in, and the windows were small, maybe even too small for him to climb through. Logically, they should head for the living room. But, Raffi reasoned, the man was working on the same information. If he was one step ahead – which the monster always is – he’d be waiting outside the front door. Though her heart was willing her to run, run, run, Raffi knew the smartest, safest thing was to let him make the first move.

‘So, we sit tight and wait for him to kill us?’ Priya hissed. ‘Is that the plan?’

‘It beats running into his knife,’ Raffi returned. ‘We need to figure out where he is.’

Mack gave a sudden cry and her nails cut into Raffi’s palm.

‘What? What’s wrong?’

‘Something touched my arm – what if he’s already inside?’

Raffi didn’t want to think about that. Didn’t want to imagine him easing open the back door and slipping into the mudroom. Or picture that hard, unflinching gaze she’d met on the cliff top finding her in the dark. As soon as Mack said it, she felt certain it was true. He was there in the hall with them, a hulking figure playing a frightening game of Statues. A wave of terror washed over her and she pressed her hand to the wall for support.

‘That’s it, I’m getting out,’ Priya said.

‘Wait.’ Raffi’s heart contracted. ‘We still need a torch. Mine’s in the kitchen from last night.’ She’d seen it on the bench beside Priya’s, but in her shock at the blood and the mess, she’d failed to pick it up. Stupid. Stupid.

A sudden thud sounded somewhere overhead.

Mack screamed again. ‘What was that?!’

‘He’s on the roof,’ Priya squeaked.

The sound came again, softer this time, the tin protesting beneath the man’s weight. The three of them listened, frozen, as his footsteps creaked closer overhead. From the sound of it, he’d used the rainwater tank by the bathroom to climb up and was making his way to the centre of the house. The footsteps paused above them, as though he’d pinpointed their location.

Raffi waited, gripping Mack’s hand, her senses on high alert. Full minutes passed, and the man made no further sound. Priya pressed closer and Raffi could see the whites of her eyes, wide with fear.

‘What the fuck?’ she whispered ‘Is he still –’

BANG!

Raffi screamed along with the others, her hands flying up to protect her head. Her first thought was that he had a gun. But there was no rain of ceiling plaster. And no horror villain worth their salt used long-range weapons. They preferred to get up close and personal with their victims. Raffi fought a fresh wave of fear.

‘Mack, Priya – you okay?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Yeah.’

The sound came again. And again. Not a gun, Raffi realised. He had some solid object and was slamming it down on the tin, over and over.

‘What is that?’ Priya whimpered.

Raffi thought about the Smiling Jack legend she’d shared with Mack the night before. Footsteps on the roof. Heeltaps at the window. The severed head, lowered by its hair. Mask, she corrected herself. The girl saw a mask. She forced it from her mind; this was their chance to get out. But they needed to move now.

‘Go to the front door and move the couch,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll get the torches.’

‘We can’t split up,’ Mack insisted.

Raffi knew leaving the group was risky. Reckless even. But going out the front door put them closer to the main path and the other lodges – closer to safety – and if one of them had to spend a moment alone, it should be the girl who best understood what they were up against. And it would only be a moment. Even in the dark. There and back again. So long as she was reunited with the others and out the door before the man came down from the roof, she wasn’t in any danger. She gave Mack’s hand a final squeeze before letting go. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

Raffi used the wall as a guide as she made her way to the kitchen, ignoring the steady BANG! BANG! BANG! overhead that seemed to be following her down the hall. Had the man overheard them? Raffi didn’t think so, not through the ceiling and roof. More likely he’d heard their screams and decided it was time for his next trick. All the more reason to hurry. She felt her way into the mudroom, stumbling over the small step down as she crossed the threshold. When she regained her balance, the banging and the footsteps had stopped. But her eyes had begun to adjust, and she could just make out the fainter rectangle of the back door window in the gloom.

She paused, listening, trying to sense whether the man was still on the roof. But she couldn’t hear him.

If he’d been inside without them knowing the previous night, he could absolutely be lowering himself off the rainwater tank at that moment, or stalking calmly towards the door. It made her nervous, and her brain wasn’t helping. It was reminding her how Ted Bundy had done the same thing to his victims, creeping soundlessly around their houses while they slept. Some hadn’t even woken up before he killed them. Raffi could not allow herself to think about that. Could not allow her fear to take the wheel. Focus. She dropped to all fours in case he was looking in and felt for the kitchen doorway.

She could picture the two torches on the bench to her left beneath the louvered windows. It was a clear night, and the windows had no curtains or blinds. From her place on the floor, she saw starlight winking through the glass. It illuminated vague shapes in the room: the table to her right, the sink on the wall ahead. She groped her way to the cupboards beneath the bench and felt along the benchtop for the torches as she stood.

To her relief, she found them almost immediately. Hers was small and lightweight, a cheapy from the supermarket that she tucked in the back pocket of her jeans. Priya’s was the real deal – a hefty Maglite. Her hands were shaking, and it felt good to have something solid to grip. She thought about taking a second knife from the drawer, wondering if she could use it if she had to. Whether she had the stomach and strength for real violence.

But before she could make a move towards the cutlery drawer, something hurtled past the window and landed on the gravel with a fleshy thud. She bit her lip and clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out and giving herself away. The first object was followed by something far larger. Raffi dropped back to a crouch. From her position on the floor, she watched a solid shape rise against the sky to block the stars. She hugged her knees to her chest and pressed herself as flat as she could against the cupboards, praying the man couldn’t see her. And that she wouldn’t wet herself.

There was a sharp sound overhead. Metal on glass.

Tap, tap, tap.

Shit.

He had the knife.

Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

The blade made a jagged screeching sound as he dragged its tip across one of the slats. Did he know she was in there, or was he just hedging his bets? She couldn’t move to look at him without giving herself away. But she could feel the tractor beam of his gaze scanning the room, seeking her out. Raffi kept very still, and every passing second seemed an eternity, until his footsteps crunched past the back door and she heard him do the same thing on the bathroom window. Her muscles relaxed a little knowing that the deeper dark of the house was keeping them safe, at least for now.

The smartest move was to make her way back down the hall as quickly as possible and for her and her friends to escape out the front door while the man was distracted spooking shadows. And Raffi would absolutely do that. But first, she had to know what he’d dropped from the roof. She needed to understand what level of threat they were dealing with. Because what if the bloodied thing the girl saw in the window all those years ago hadn’t been a mask?

What if something terrible had happened to Shelley?

Raffi stood slowly, shaking so badly she had to brace herself against the bench for support. Keeping her ears pricked for the man’s return, she covered the front of Priya’s torch with her jumper to dim the beam then switched it on. A faint, jaundice circle glowed on the linoleum. Moving slowly, Raffi raised it to the glass. Her own startled reflection stared back, the beam blocked by the slats. If she wanted to see what lay on the ground, she needed to open the louvre. She took a deep breath and listened. The man was still tap, tap, tap-ing his knife at the bathroom window.

She angled the light to find the lever and gave it a tug with her free hand. It didn’t make any noise, but it also didn’t move.

‘Come on,’ she whispered, and tried again with more force.

The glass slats shrieked partway open.

Too loud.

The tapping stopped.

Raffi shone the torch through the gap between the slats. A deflated basketball lay on the gravel. The man had used a black marker to give it a face so that it looked like a Halloween pumpkin. Trick or treat?! Her stomach dropped. It was the sort of thing one of their classmates might do as a joke. If Raffi and her friends survived this, the man was going to make sure they couldn’t prove his existence. They would sound hysterical, would have to live knowing he was still out there, while he kept returning, again and again.

Footsteps crunched across the gravel. Raffi switched off the torch and crouched low. She started to move towards the mudroom to make the return trip along the hall, but there came a soft click at the back door. Raffi felt the chill air seeping in as it opened. She made a quick calculation. From her spot in the kitchen, she’d need to cross in front of the back door to make it to the hall, putting herself directly in the man’s path as he entered the house. Instead, she scuttled backwards on her hands and knees to crouch beneath the kitchen table. She prayed the dark was enough to keep her hidden. That whatever nocturnal vision he had wouldn’t be enough to spot her if she stayed completely still.

Her eyes strained against the dark, and her ears pricked. But only the barely-there click of the door closing told her he was inside. There was no way Priya and Mack would have heard him from the living room. And no way Raffi could warn them without drawing attention to herself.

She’d once read that in truly dangerous situations, people rarely feel afraid. Fear is a luxury: it means the bad thing hasn’t happened yet. Staring towards the kitchen door, at the place where she imagined the man to be, Raffi felt a terrible calm settle over her. The man’s steps were whisper-soft as he entered the room. She sensed him beginning a slow circle around the table. A hulking shape moving through the dark. Then he stopped. There was a sudden movement accompanied by a scraping and a splintering BANG. A chair. One of the heavy, wooden kitchen chairs being slammed against the table.

Scrape.

BANG.

A second chair was rammed beneath the table a breath from her fingertips. The man was moving anti-clockwise around the table. Listening for the thwack of wood meeting bone to pinpoint her location. The next chair he was likely to try was behind her to the left, and in the confined space, would hit her sneaker. Unless she moved. Fast. With only the faint greying from the windows to guide her, she gauged the kitchen door was ahead and slightly to her right. She felt for the chair he’d rammed across her path. Her palms were sweaty against the wood and her pulse thunder in her ears as she took hold of the front legs and eased it aside.

Scrape.

BANG.

She scootched forward into the freed space ahead, but not fast enough. The chair connected with her big toe. Pain speared up her leg and she exhaled a silent scream. The man must have felt the impact. Must know where she was hiding. She started to crawl forward, but all the Final Girls in her head screamed in chorus: GET DOWN! And she flattened herself against the floor as metal split wood and the knife slammed through the tabletop. She tucked her legs into a fetal curl and pulled her arms in close, hands balled to fists to keep him from stamping on her fingers. Even so, her body was a sung fit beneath the table.

‘Raffi?’ Mack’s voice, high with fear, carried down the hall.

She’d taken too long. The man had made too much noise.

Don’t do anything impulsive, Mack.

But the man was already moving, his footsteps quick and light; a frightened girl hurrying back to her friends.

Get out! She wanted to scream. That’s not me; you need to run.

Instead, that strange, calm force within her shoved the chair out of the way and used the seat to pull her body to stand. The torch was heavy in her hand, the unguarded back door forgotten.

Raffi was a shadow in the dark, moving silent down the hall behind the man. She could feel the heat of his exertions radiating from his clothes and breathed the faint, sour smell of his sweat. The hall was maybe six metres in length. She counted her steps, marking the distance, and for a second there in the pitch dark, with the man unaware of her presence and Priya’s Maglite held ready, she felt powerful. This was Final Girl shit. Except that if this were a horror movie, her character likely wouldn’t live to see the final showdown. Best Friend shit then.

‘Raffi, is that you?’

The man stopped and Raffi judged she must be almost at the end of the hall, which placed him a step or two into the living room. Within arm’s reach of her friends. She pictured him raising the knife. The blade slashing through the dark. She had less than a second to make her move. One shot to take him down. She switched on the torch as she drew it back to strike. The beam swung across the man, catching him side-on. He was on tiptoes, arms raised in parody of a monster, the knife high and flashing and his mouth wide in a clownish grin. Mack and Priya screamed, arms rising to cover their faces, before cutting back into darkness as Raffi put all her strength and rage behind her arm and swung the torch at the man’s head.

She felt rather than saw the impact. At once, soft and hard. Skin and bone. That sickening sensation would echo in her arm as long as she lived – which wouldn’t be long, if the man had his way. Distantly, she registered a dull clatter as the knife hit the edge of the coffee table and landed on the floor. The man made a strange sound, more groan than cry, and staggered slightly. And as he turned to face her, Raffi realised her mistake. His mouth hung at a ghoulish angle. Blood welled to stain his teeth. She’d been aiming for his head, but had hit his jaw. The second it took to register was a second too long. There was a blur of movement and a starburst of pain as he slammed his fist into her stomach. The force of the blow shocked the air from her lungs. Somewhere, someone was screaming. The man’s fist caught her a second time.

Raffi dropped to her knees.

Dropped the torch.

Tasted blood.

Darkness spun. She could barely make out the man’s shape as he stood over her, jaw loose and dribbling blood. Before his boot stomped against her ribs. Pain like fireworks. Her whole body lit up and sparking. She had just enough time to bring her arms up to cover her face before his next kick landed. His eyes were cold and blank as he drove his boot down again and again.

‘RAFFI!’

Mack’s cry cut through the pain. Raffi was down, but her friends were okay. They could still make it out.

‘Torch, Mack! Get the torch!’ she gasped between blows.

Don’t be heroic. Please, please don’t be heroic.

The man stamped his foot again, catching her on the chest as she tried to roll away, tried to nudge the torch towards her friends.

The light swung as Mack snatched it up, and with the last of her strength, Raffi reached out to grab the man’s ankle. She would hold him back, even if it was only for a second or two.

‘Run.’ The word was a ghost on her lips. She tried again, eyes pleading on Mack and the sound slippery with the blood in her throat as the man raised his boot a final time. ‘Run.’

PRIYA

Priya froze when she saw Raffi crumple around the man’s fist. She’d never seen true violence up close, and gory movies hadn’t prepared her for the real thing. The man’s leg was a piston. His boot stomping Raffi’s chest again and again. Light lolled across her face – a frozen scream piercing the dark – as the torch rolled from her hand.

It all happened so quickly. So quietly.

As though without the rising shriek of violins the man had jumped his cue.

Priya had to fight the absurd urge to scream: You’re not allowed to do that!

As though there were rules.

As though the man cared.

Because that was the other terrifying thing she came to understand in those crucial seconds: he didn’t see them as people. He hadn’t chosen them because they were Priya, Mack, Raffi and Shelley (oh God, where was Shelley?). He’d chosen them because they were the Girls in the Lodge. Their likes and dislikes, talents, friendships – none of it mattered to him. He didn’t care who they were or what they might do with their lives. He didn’t know that Priya could play the piano and speak semi-fluent French, or that she wanted to be a chemical engineer and hated peas. It didn’t matter to him that her favourite drink was the chai her mum made with her own spice mix each morning on the stove, or that she still slept with the pink Care Bear she’d been given for her second birthday. Everything that she was and might become – he wanted to stamp it out.

When Raffi grabbed the man’s ankle, Priya understood she was removing herself from play to give them a chance. And they owed it to her, to their loved ones and themselves to take it.

Run.

The word was an adrenaline shot, thawing her frozen limbs and flooding out her fear. She hooked an arm around Mack’s waist to drag her from the lodge while the man struggled to kick himself free. Mack resisted, screaming Raffi’s name and channelling all her water polo and lacrosse training into fighting Priya’s grip. The man lunged, kicking free of Raffi’s hold. He found his balance with his next step, and swung his arm hard, catching Mack on the shoulder as she tried to get by him. She cried out, more surprised than hurt, almost as though in the dark and her panic to get to Raffi, she’d forgotten the monster between them.

Priya caught the torch as Mack let it go and aimed it at the man’s eyes as he drew his arm back to take a second swing. The light hit him, hard as a fist. White powder flaked from his cheeks, revealing the pinkish skin beneath. Raffi had broken his jaw, leaving his mouth bloody and sagging to the right where the bone had shattered from the joint. He blinked rapidly and squinted, his pupils blown wide, but brown at the edges. Human.

We were promised a legend, Priya thought. But he’s just a man. The worst kind of man.

Whatever he’d taken to improve his night vision had left him blind in the light. Her hand shook, but she gripped the torch and kept the beam trained on his eyes as she took hold of Mack’s arm and backed out the door. She tried not to look at the still shape on the floor behind him. Raffi’s face pale and slack, a thin spill of blood at the corner of her mouth. Mack screamed her name over and over as Priya drag-wrestled her out to the verandah and down the steps. The man lumbered after them, one arm raised to block the light.

He seemed disoriented; this wasn’t how he’d pictured the night unfolding. Half-blind and distracted by what must have been tremendous pain in his jaw, he missed the top step. Priya watched him fall as if in slow motion: his foot hovered in midair and panic flashed in his eyes as he slipped through the space where he’d expected to find purchase. His body rocked forward, overbalancing, and his hands shot out to break his fall, but too late. He landed at a bad angle, the concrete steps catching him on the elbow, hip and shin, and his startled cry was accompanied by a dull crack as his forehead met the corner of the bottom step.

Priya clung to Mack and kept the torch trained on the man as he lifted his gored face to the light. He’d hit the step just above his eyebrow and blood welled from the cut, running into his eye and down his cheek. He tried to blink it away as he pushed himself up, but failed on both counts and collapsed with a low moan. He seemed to be trying to say something, his shattered jaw working painfully, failing to make the words. His eyes remained hard and furious and, unable to stand, he struck an arm out, clawing his way across the gravel towards them. Not that he had a hope of reaching them in that state.

Jason Voorhees, my arse, Priya thought, tugging Mack towards the main track. ‘Come on!’

Mack was in shock, moving like a robot. Her feet dragged in the gravel and a high-pitched whimper sounded in her throat. Priya’s muscles were already beginning to tire with the effort of pulling her along. She couldn’t stop seeing the man’s broken face. The clear focus and intent in his eyes as he stomped Raffi down.

Priya screamed all the air from her lungs.

‘HELP!’

The wind was working against her and she knew her classmates in the other lodges were likely too far away to hear her through the bush. Even if they weren’t, they’d be taking showers. Cooking dinner. Turning up the music for a final night of fun. But she had to try.

‘WE NEED HELP!’

Mack was sobbing, crying Raffi’s name over and over, as though they were still in the living room. Priya managed to coax her as far as the turn-off for the boys’ lodges at the base of the rise before Mack came back to herself and dug in her heels.

‘Stop, Priya!’

Priya kept hold of her. Kept trying to pull her along the track. ‘We need to get help.’

‘I’m not leaving Raffi!’

Priya looked at her friend for the first time since leaving the lodge. Her face was streaked with tears and her whole body shook. She aimed the torch back behind them to make sure the man hadn’t managed to right himself and follow them, then took hold of Mack’s arms to steady her so she could look her in the eye.

‘Listen, Mack. We saw Raffi get hurt and that was scary, but she held him back so that we could get out. We’re going to make a run for the teachers’ lodge and use their sat phone to call the police and an ambulance.’

‘I’m not going without her,’ Mack insisted.

Priya tightened her grip. ‘He’s still back there, Mack. He’s still dangerous.’

‘Exactly! He could kill her.’

The image of Raffi’s body, still and twisted on the carpet rose between them.

‘Mack –’ Priya started, gently. The words were stones in her belly.

‘No!’ Mack shoved her away, shaking her head. ‘Don’t you say it. Don’t you fucking say it.’ Her eyes shone with new tears. ‘She’s fine and I’m going back!’

Priya felt a spike of anger. There was a thin line between heroic and reckless, and returning to the lodge – to the man – was firmly the latter. Raffi could have gone out the back door and saved herself. Instead, she’d followed the man down the hall to give them a chance and paid dearly for it. Why couldn’t Mack see that?

‘There’s only one torch.’

Priya figured this was checkmate. The dark was total and the town full of hazards that might kill or injure them just as easily as the man; splitting up was a death wish.

But Mack jutted her chin. ‘She’s our friend,’ she spat, turning for the lodge. ‘Grow a fucking spine.’

Priya stared at Mack’s retreating back. It was so typical. So selfish of Mack to go charging into danger with lofty ideas about saving the day and no thought for how she’d manage it. Priya didn’t want to leave Raffi either. But they had to get help. Going to the teachers’ lodge was their best chance of putting a stop to the man before he hurt anyone else.

She turned back towards the town’s entrance and let her anger carry her forward. But instead of speeding up to a run, she found herself slowing with each step. She imagined Raffi coming-to in the dark. Injured and afraid. Not knowing whether the man was gone or crouched beside her, waiting for her to rise. She pictured Mack stumbling off the path by mistake, growing panicked and disoriented as she tried and failed to find her way. She saw police torch beams crisscrossing the empty verandah steps two hours from now, finding only drag marks and dried blood in the dirt where the man was supposed to be. Her torch beam flickered and the night pressed close. He was so stealthy, so silent, he could be anywhere.

Priya shivered and stopped, remembering the terror of being alone with his nightmare grin on that very stretch of track. She wouldn’t wish it on her worst enemy, let alone her friends.

She sighed and swore. ‘Wait up, Mack!’

But Mack wasn’t on the track. They’d been separated less than a minute, and Priya figured she couldn’t be moving very fast in the dark, not if she wanted to avoid a twisted ankle or low-hanging branch to the face. In theory, she should still be well within sight.

‘Mack, where are you?’ She swung the torch, scanning the bush on either side of the path. The wind ruffled the low trees, and the leaves seemed to snigger at her panic.

‘I don’t care if you’re pissed. Answer me!’

‘Over here.’

Her voice came from the turn-off to Overseer’s. She had to have been running at full pelt and maintained a good sense of direction, even without being able to see. Priya felt a rush of relief knowing that she was safe. For now. God, how she wanted this night to be over.

‘Stay there. We’ll get Raffi together.’

She jogged to catch up and rounded the bend to find Mack waiting with her hands on her hips, though Priya thought she looked more scared than tetchy. ‘I can’t believe you were going to leave us –’ Her expression froze. ‘Wait, did you hear that?’

They huddled together, listening. Sure enough, there came a soft dragging sound.

Priya shone the torch in a slow arc across the clearing in front of the house. The verandah steps were empty.

Oh shit. ‘Where’d he go?’

The dragging sound continued. Priya couldn’t figure out which direction it was coming from. She tried to use the blood spattered across the gravel to see which way the man had gone, but there was too much leaf litter around to make out a trail from where they stood. She aimed the torch at the trees, half-hoping, half-terrified she’d see his ruined face glaring out between the trunks. But he wasn’t there.

‘What if he went back inside?’ Mack’s voice hitched with new panic and she turned for the verandah.

As she did, there was a flicker of movement at the edge of the light. A shape rising up to block the beam.

‘Behind you, Mack! Look out!’

Priya barely had time to warn her before the man launched his weight at Mack. From his crouched position, he rammed her square in the chest, knocking her down. Her cry cut short as the impact left her winded. The man took advantage of her shock and spidered on top of her, keeping her down with a sharp blow to the head as he straddled her chest.

‘GET OFF HER!’ Priya screamed, startling birds from the surrounding trees and setting the night screeching with her distress.

Mack kicked out and tried to get her arms beneath his chest to push him off, but his hands were already at her throat and squeezing tight.

‘Help!’ she wheezed. ‘Help!’

Priya swung the torch at him, aiming for his head but hitting his shoulder. For all the good it did. Years of calorie counting and skipped meals had left her flat-stomached but weak.

The man swivelled his head towards her. His face was crusted with dust and semi-dried blood. A sour, metallic smell wafted from his gaping mouth and his eyes were pure fury. He’d believed he was smarter than them, and they’d humiliated him by catching him out. They’d found his car. Spilled his blood. Seen him in the light. He couldn’t let them live. Priya knew that a man of his ego would not allow himself to be exposed by a group of schoolgirls. He’d make them pay – make them bleed – for what they’d done to him.

He made a slurred sound that might have been words. Might have been, Wait your turn.

Priya staggered back, and, realising she couldn’t beat him with sheer force, dropped the torch to attack his hands, digging her nails into his fingers and fighting to claw them from around Mack’s neck. He growled in irritation, spraying spittle and blood, then something sharp clamped down on her ear.

‘Ow!’ She jerked away.

He’d bitten her! He’d used the uninjured side of his jaw and fucking bitten her!

And he still had his hands around Mack’s throat, pressing her arms to the ground with his knees. Mack was gasping without drawing any air, and her feet kicked at the gravel. Priya ignored the swelling heat in her earlobe, and threw herself, screaming, at the man’s back, trying to pull him off. But even injured he was strong, and there was so much of him. He carried on strangling Mack as though she weren’t there. Priya needed a weapon. Not a knife or a torch. Something she could actually use.

Her thoughts scrabbled for options and her hand went instinctively to her pockets. Lip gloss, a tissue, loose coins and . . . her fingers closed around metal teeth. The lodge key, on its boot-shaped Sturt Peninsula key chain.

Mack’s lips were turning blue. Her eyes were rolling back and her feet were twitching more than kicking.

Priya pushed the key up between her index and middle fingers and made a fist around the ring, same as she’d done dozens of times walking back to her car at the end of a night shift at Movieland. She thought of the sheep’s eye they’d dissected last term in Biology. The stomach-churning texture: the sclera rubbery and surprisingly tough, but jellied at the pupil.

Don’t think about it. Just aim for the middle.

Small, wet sounds came from Mack’s throat and her body was limp.

Now, Priya commanded herself. Do it now.

She swung her fist around and drove it up towards the man’s eye.

He blinked at the sudden movement and she felt the key bite through the delicate skin of his eyelid before she drove it home.

The man howled. An awful, animal sound. His head jerked back, his skull slamming against Priya’s teeth. She tasted greasy hair on her lips and something hot and wet ran over her fingers before the man reared up and threw her from his back.

She landed hard on her side, gravel spiking through her thin top. But the torch was within reach. She grabbed for it with shaking fingers, and her stomach heaved as she scrabbled to her feet.

Mack was still on her back, bruises already forming at her throat. Her eyes were closed, but her body shuddered with the effort of pulling air into her lungs. Alive. She was still alive.

Priya sobbed with relief and started towards Mack, but was stopped by a low growl. She aimed her torch towards the sound. The man was crouched beside Mack. His face was crusted in blood and dust. His tongue lolled from his shattered jaw and the key remained jammed in his eye socket, the peninsula pendant swinging from its chain with the movement of his breath.

He hissed at the sudden brightness and lunged at her.

Priya stumbled back, tripping over her feet as she turned for the main track.

‘HELP!’ she screamed. ‘SOMEBODY, HELP US!’

She managed to keep her balance, the torch swinging wildly at her side, strobing the dark as she ran. But even with the light, she couldn’t see more than a few metres ahead. It felt like hurtling towards an abyss.

Get to the Gatehouse, she told herself. Everything will be okay once you reach the Gatehouse.

Even in her frantic state, she knew this was magical thinking. The nearest police station was in Troubridge, more than eighty kilometres away. Real help wasn’t coming any time soon. And when it did, Priya would still be the girl who took a man’s eye.

A violent girl.

A dangerous girl.

Her future shifted. She felt the life she wanted sinking beyond reach. And the man was still coming. Still staggering behind her, determined to wipe her future altogether.

She screamed in anguish. This was bullshit!

The sound echoed back: a howl of pain and rage, and her torch beam caught two discs flashing radium bright in the dark ahead.

Priya swung the light at the place and stumbled to a stop. There was a figure standing in the middle of the path.

‘Shelley?’

Relief washed over her, but it was gone as quick as it came. Shelley was almost unrecognisable. The angles of her body looked wrong as she staggered towards Priya. She was still wearing her pyjamas from the night before, but they were filthy, caked in dust and soot and her hair was matted with cobwebs. One hand hung limp at her side, crusted in gore. And her skin stretched too tight against her bones, every muscle tense and straining. Her head was down, but her eyes were up, fixed on something over Priya’s shoulder, as though she were being drawn towards it. Her good hand made a fist and blood seeped from her palm where her nails cut into her skin. Shelley didn’t seem to notice. Her whole body thrummed and Priya was afraid to get any closer.

‘Are you okay?’

‘He’s in the trees.’

Her voice was a husky monotone, an octave too deep.

‘What –?’

Shelley’s focus snapped towards her. Cats’ eyes gleaming in the dark. Her mouth twisting, yawning wide.

Impossibly wide.

‘WATCH OUT!’

Something large and heavy slammed against Priya’s back, sending her face-first into the gravel. Her arms shot out to break her fall and the thing – the man, it could only be the man – landed on top of her, knocking the scream from her lungs. His breath was a hot, bloodied rasp in her ear and she tried to scrabble free, but it was like trying to move under bags of wet sand. Her head throbbed with the impact of the fall. The torch light throbbed with it. A terrible buzzing sound grew steadily louder, as though a beehive had cracked open in Priya’s brain. Static. Or rain. Heavy rain coming down through the trees. Glinting red in the light. There was a sharp smell of pine needles and eucalyptus. And something clean and spiced. Covet. Shelley’s sneakered feet and the grubby hems of her pyjama bottoms crossed Priya’s field of vision, moving fast. Too fast.

The weight lifted from her back. Pulled with astonishing force. Priya had a queasy feeling. It was the same feeling she’d had at the doctor six months before when they’d given her a local anaesthetic and placed a paper sheet over her face to slice out a cyst beneath her jaw.

There was no pain now, only slight pressure. And the knowledge of something abject and terrible occurring just out of sight. She tasted whisky at the back of her throat and felt she was going to be sick. Wind whipped around her, rain needled her skin, and – weirdly – the familiar opening notes of a No Doubt song drifted through her head, drowning out the other awful sounds. She let the music carry her, lifting her out of herself to a place beyond terror – the place you went when fear overwhelmed and ceased to mean anything. The music jumped and looped.

Something thumped beside her in the dark.

Don’t look at it.

She tried to crawl away, but her body wouldn’t move. The light came back. Went again. Her stomach heaved and she threw up on her hands. The dark pulsed violet. She saw visions in red, too terrible to name, and focused instead on the rain coming down. Warm and wet, soaking her through. The thing beside her flailed and twitched. Don’t look. She closed her eyes and kept them closed while the echo of a distant storm raged around her.

SHELLEY

Our bodies hold our history. They are shaped by experience and adapt to circumstance. Success lifts the chin, guides the shoulders down and back. It allows air to go deep in the lungs. But shame someone repeatedly, and it weighs down their gaze. Cut them deep enough, and the skin forever puckers around the memory of the wound.

The night Matthew Rourke came into Shelley’s room, he injured her soul-deep. Her body came undone, collapsing in on itself. In the days and weeks that followed, she shook with the effort of holding herself together, every muscle tensed against the threat of his return. And against the cutting words of her disbelieving peers.

Bitch. Liar. Slut.

Her stomach clenched so tight she couldn’t keep down food. Pain pulsed in her stiffened limbs. Sleep became impossible. She was both exhausted and hyper alert, unable to focus. Her angles turned sharp. She didn’t recognise herself. She kept picking and scratching at her skin to try to get some relief. Ease the pressure. But her body was a spring winding up, and up, and up.

Until it was ready to snap.

The second time Matthew tried to hurt her, he met a changed girl. It was a Friday afternoon and Shelley was walking home from school. Normally, this was her favourite part of the day: a half-hour for herself when she could put on her headphones, turn up the volume on her Discman and just be. But that afternoon, the sky had come over dark as school let out. The air turned cold and damp and the approaching storm sang on Shelley’s back teeth as she crossed the oval.

It’d been a shit day. Sam Timms had broken up with Carly Kersbrook the night before, and Carly had spread a rumour that she’d seen Shelley making eyes at him. The Belair Bitch strikes again. At lunch, Carly’s friends tore chunks off their sandwiches and lobbed them at Shelley across the lawn until she gathered her lunch and her book and retreated to the library. She’d also found out that she’d failed her most recent Maths test. Her bag was heavy with homework, bumping the back of her thighs as she walked, and her Discman was out of battery. She wanted to get home, change into her pyjamas, pop on the oven for chips and claim the couch for a Buffy marathon.

Her house backed onto Weemala Reserve, a large park with a playground and picnic lawn skirted by bushland thick with pine trees and eucalypts with a creek running through where kids from her school went to get high and up to no good. Shelley usually gave it a wide berth. But as she neared the playground, the first fat drops of rain splodged her shirt, and she knew she could save ten minutes and a soaking by cutting through the trees.

Out of habit, she scanned the park. A few kids from the nearby primary school monkeyed over the climbing frame, unconcerned by the weather, while their mums gathered snacks and schoolbags and wheeled younger siblings in their prams towards the barbecue shelter to wait out the rain. Someone had taped small bunches of balloons to the shelter’s posts and there was a supermarket cake with six candles waiting on one of the picnic tables. None of the party appeared to notice Shelley, and yet, as she skirted around the sandpit, she felt someone’s gaze settle between her shoulder blades. The sensation was so strong, she stopped and turned. Nothing. No one. She told herself she was being paranoid. Her body still responding to the echo of a threat.

The drops became a downpour and the mums called their kids to come in from the rain. Shelley ran to shelter beneath the trees. The storm grew to a static roar overhead, but the canopy kept her semi-dry as she made her way towards the creek where the water was high and running fast. She was almost at the bank, scouting for a safe place to cross, when a twig snapped close behind her.

The waft of Covet mixed with the spiced scent of pine needles and eucalyptus.

She froze.

‘Hey, Shell Bell.’

Her pulse kicked up and her jaw clamped so tight she could barely speak.

‘Go away, Matt.’

‘Come on, don’t be like that. I just want to talk.’

She crossed her arms, protecting her chest as she turned. He was leaning against a nearby tree: hands in his pockets, smile like a blade.

Shelley narrowed her eyes at him. ‘You ruined my life.’

His face fell and he took a step towards her. ‘I warned you not to tell anyone. It was supposed to be our secret.’

She opened her mouth to protest, but he held up a hand.

‘I get why you’re angry – Tori can be a real bitch when she’s upset – but I thought you were above all that high school bullshit.’

Her mouth went dry. Tori wasn’t the problem. Not much of it, anyway.

He ran a hand through his hair. ‘I’m messing this up. I wanted to apologise. I can’t stop thinking about that night.’ He half-smiled at her through the falling curtain of his fringe. ‘About you.’

And now he had her alone again. Fear needled her skin and the rising beat of a migraine pulsed behind her right eye.

‘I’ve missed you, Shelley.’

He took a step towards her, backing her up against the wide trunk of a towering pine. The bark was rough though her shirt and her bag was heavy, putting her off-balance.

‘Leave me alone.’

‘I can’t.’

She tried to duck but he braced an arm against the tree, blocking her path, and leaned close.

‘You’ve put a spell on me, Shelley,’ he said, voice husky in her ear.

Her body tensed to feel his breath on her skin. He grabbed her waist with his free hand and circled his thumb across the thin fabric of her shirt above her hip.

‘Don’t.’

The word was flimsy and he pushed right past it, nuzzling his nose along her cheek.

She squirmed, unable to get enough air. The temperature was dropping, the Bad Feeling rising. She felt hot and itchy. Feverish.

‘I mean it, Matt. I’m not well.’

Her pulse boomed behind her eyes, making the trees jump and she was sure she was going to be sick.

‘I’ll kiss you better.’

She hunched up her shoulders by her ears and tried to squirm out of his reach, but he drove his thumb hard into the soft skin above her hip and nudged his knee between her thighs as he forced her back against the tree to kiss her.

‘Stop it!’ She managed to move her arms enough to press her palms to his chest and push him away.

He shoved her back. Her head cracked against the trunk and she cried out.

Red blots swam before her eyes.

And his hands were on her face, fingers stroking her cheeks.

‘Hey, now, look what you made me do.’

His face was so close to hers. All eyes and teeth. Crowding her.

‘I want this to be sweet for us, okay? I’m going to make you feel so special, Shell Bell. Even better than last time. But you’ve got to hold still.’

Blood trickled warm down the back of her shirt. Her heart screamed and when he reached for her again, something in her snapped. All that tight-coiled tension – all the pain and damage she’d been holding in – raged free. She saw his face twist in horror and the storm strobed red.

The next thing Shelley knew, she was soaked through and standing at the edge of the sandpit back at the playground. Her bag was gone and the rain had stopped. Everything was fresh and glistening, and someone was speaking to her.

‘Hey, what happened? Are you hurt?’

It was one of the mums. Her voice seemed to come from very far away, even though she was standing right beside her. The other mums had herded the kids across the playground and were distracting them from looking at Shelley with a game of ‘shops’.

‘Is that your blood?’

Shelley followed the woman’s gaze down to her shirt. The white fabric was stained dark and stuck to her skin. Her head throbbed. There was a buzzing in her ears. She tried to lift a hand to her hair but she was too far outside herself. Everything was pins and needles. She felt unsteady. One second she was looking at the park, wet and green, the next it tilted away.

The woman caught her as she fell.

‘Easy, now. You’ve got a head injury. Hey, Trace! Ange!’ the woman yelled back to her friends. ‘Get the kids in the cars and call triple zero! What’s your name, hon?’ she asked, turning back to Shelley.

‘Shelley.’

‘Hey, Shelley, I’m Josie.’ The woman rummaged in her bag and pressed a nappy to the place where Shelley’s head had hit the tree. ‘I’m a nurse, and my friends are going to get you some help, okay?’

Shelley managed a nod. Her bones were heavy.

‘Did someone hurt you, Shelley?’

Rough hands on her skin.

Sour breath in her ear.

The weight of a body bearing down.

Shelley blinked at the woman, her vision returning, steady and clear.

‘He’s in the trees.’

The police found Matthew Rourke’s body impaled on the broken bough of a gum tree overhanging the creek, his feet suspended a metre above the water and his lower jaw wrenched open in an unnatural scream. He had several broken bones, his eyes had been gouged and his hands torn clear of his wrists. Other vital parts of him were also missing.

Shelley was taken to the nearest hospital and examined by several doctors. They concluded her amnesia was likely caused by concussion resulting from her head injury, and that she was exhibiting signs of shock and severe PTSD. All agreed that a girl of her stature was incapable of inflicting Matthew’s injuries. It seemed unlikely any single person – or, indeed, anything human – could.

From what the mothers told the police, Shelley had crossed the park alone, just before three-forty-five pm as the rain started, and emerged no more than fifteen minutes later when it eased. They heard no sounds of distress and none of them recalled seeing Matthew Rourke prior to his death. It was assumed Shelley had stumbled on his body. That she was bloody from her efforts to save him before realising it was too late, and that she’d fallen and hit her head when she ran to get help.

While Shelley still couldn’t say for certain what had occurred in the moments after Matthew touched her, her body remembered. The taste of his blood coated her tongue, and his death lived in her hands. All she had wanted was for him to leave her alone, and instead he’d made her a monster.

The secret ate her up. Matthew stalked her dreams. And in the days following his death, she promised herself that she would never hurt another person. Even if they were bad. Even if they deserved it. It wasn’t worth the human part of her it cost.

So, when the man came after her, she had reacted as any girl would.

She ran.

She hid.

She stayed in the chimney’s webby, feathery dark until her limbs cramped and her bladder ached and she was certain he had given up. And then she had eased herself free and gone to warn her friends. They would go to the teachers. Call the police and let them hunt him out. But then she’d heard Priya’s anguished scream. Felt her rage and pain and fear radiating through the dark. And when she saw the man leap for her – already half-dead and hellbent on taking Priya down with him – Shelley broke her promise to herself and chose to show her strength.

RAFFI

Raffi only knew she was alive and awake because of the pain. The dark was absolute, but every inhale was a knife in her ribs. She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious. Or whether she was alone in the lodge. Her mouth tasted sour and she was afraid to speak. Afraid to move, in case the man was still with her. Waiting for her to sit up so he could put her down again. Her ears strained against the hush. She hoped the silence meant that Mack and Priya had made it to the Gatehouse. That they were safe.

‘Hello?’ she whispered.

A pained sigh sounded in reply. Something small and injured.

‘Mack? Priya?’

She clenched her teeth against the pain and felt for the second torch in her back pocket. Her hands shook as she fumbled for the switch and scanned the dim beam around the room. The couch was at an angle and the front door was open, complaining in the wind, but she was alone. Raffi sobbed with relief, and again with the pain it caused her. Her chest was a tender bruise and, from the sharp stab that accompanied each breath, she feared at least one of her ribs was broken. It was another minute before she recovered enough to use the couch to pull herself up, and as she did, the light glinted on something beneath the coffee table. The knife. The man had left the knife. She crawled across to it, drew strength from its heft in her hand.

Staggering out to the verandah, she saw blood on the steps and scuff marks in the gravel as though there’d been a struggle. Crickets teemed and the night was an anxious hum as she shone the torch beam over the clearing. Light washed across a shoe near the place where the path led up to the main track. Raffi held the torch steady, aiming squarely at the spot, and saw a jeaned leg. A grazed hand, palm up in the dirt. A dark tangle of hair.

Her heart contracted.

‘Mack?’

She wasn’t moving.

‘MACK!’

It hurt so much to say her name, but she pushed through the pain, forgetting her own safety. And Priya. And Shelley. And the man who’d hurt them. Her body beat Mack, Mack, Mack. No, no, no. Raffi stumbled with one arm braced across her chest, holding herself together long enough to collapse beside her, dropping the knife and the torch.

There was no blood, but Mack didn’t appear to be breathing.

Her eyes were closed.

Her mouth was slack.

Raffi knew better than to shake or move her. Instead, she pressed her fingers to Mack’s wrist, feeling for a pulse.

She was so clammy. So still.

‘Please be alive. Please, please be alive. Oh God,’ she prayed. ‘I know I don’t deserve her, but you can’t take her yet. You can’t – I’ll do anything. Anything –’

Mack groaned, her eyes fluttering open.

‘Anything?’ she croaked.

‘Mack!’ Raffi half-laughed, half-sobbed. ‘Praise saints, you’re okay. You are okay, aren’t you?’

Her tears wet Mack’s cheeks as she gathered her up and helped her to sit. As she did, Mack’s hair fell away from her face and Raffi saw the deep purplish marks where the man had choked her. Her fingers ghosted the lines.

‘What happened –?’

Mack gripped her hand with both of hers. ‘I’m fine.’

Her eyes were bloodshot. Afraid.

‘What is it?’

‘Priya,’ Mack wheezed. ‘He went after Priya.’

As though confirming it, a high, piercing scream carried from the main track.

It hurt to move. Hurt to breathe. But Raffi closed her hand on the knife’s hilt, and hoped she would have the strength to use it when the time came. ‘Wait here.’

Mack shook her head and grabbed the torch. ‘I’m coming with you.’

They had to support each other to stand, Mack holding the torch and Raffi the knife. She didn’t know how they were going to help Priya or stop the man with their injuries, only that they had to try. They followed her cries to the main track, and it seemed to grow colder, damper with every step.

The torch flickered. Mack smacked it against her thigh but the beam remained thready. The path there, then gone. And there again.

‘Shit.’

A second light winked up ahead.

‘Priya?’ Raffi called. ‘Priya, hold on! We’re coming!’

There was a sound like rising static. A radio stuck between stations.

Mack gripped her arm. ‘You hear that?’

Rain streaked silver and red in the stuttering light. Raffi glanced up, confused, to see the sky still bright with stars. The second torch pulsed time with theirs, and the night shuddered to their beat.

‘Raffi, what’s happening?’ Mack’s voice was small with fear.

The rain and the dark made it impossible to see. Something brushed past them, blocking the light. A jolt of rage. And pain. And strength. Mack screamed, the sound hoarse and broken in her injured throat.

Cats’ eyes flashed through the phantom rain. Too high in the air. A face familiar, yet not.

Both torches cut out.

The dark throbbed and the wind gusted up, roaring white noise and shaking the trees. Someone was screaming beneath the static. The air was spiced with eucalyptus and the stink of raw meat. Raffi felt unsteady. Her mouth was suddenly hot, as though she’d bitten down on alfoil, and she thought she might be sick. Mack’s grip on her waist was the only thing that felt solid and real and Raffi clung to her. She couldn’t see what was happening, but she could sense it. It was the most terrifying scenes from every scary movie and every horror novel she’d ever watched or read beaming into her brain all at once. It was H. P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones unleashed. Dionysus himself inviting her to dance.

She was awestruck.

Overwhelmed.

Pulling Mack with her as she fell to her knees, into a deeper dark.

When her awareness returned, the screaming had stopped and the night had stilled. She didn’t know whether seconds or minutes or hours had passed. The torchlights blinked slowly back, becoming steady and bright once more.

Priya lay in a fetal curl by the side of the track close by. She was shaking badly, her hands and the ground by her head covered in sick.

‘Priya, are you all right?’ Raffi choked. ‘Are you hurt?’

Priya shook her head and pointed her torch towards the middle of the path. Towards whatever had happened there. Silent tears streamed down her face and there was a horrible hitching sound in her throat.

Raffi didn’t want to look. Didn’t want to know.

And yet, she did. She had to.

Her eyes tracked slowly along the beam.

The man – what was left of him – was smeared across the gravel. Raffi had only seen one dead body before. Her grandfather in his hospice bed. His skin had been grey and powdery, his face slack in a way it’d never been in life. Someone had closed his eyes and folded his hands over his chest before she came in. He’d looked peaceful. A vessel emptied.

This was nothing like that. Nothing like the movies either. Bones jutted from cloth and skin. It smelled awful – the contents of the man’s guts exposed to the air. His blood pooled thin and dark, soaking into the gravel, and the pieces looked like hunks of meat. Most weren’t even recognisable. It reminded her of roadkill.

She knew she should feel something. Horror. Disgust. But all that came was relief.

He had hurt and terrorised them simply because he could.

A figure stood over the remains, blood soaking her pyjamas.

Mack joined her torch with Priya’s to show her in full.

‘Shelley?’

She was alive. Shelley was alive.

And the man was dead.

Butchered.

It didn’t make sense. Or Raffi didn’t want it to make sense.

And yet.

And yet.

Shelley flinched at the sound of her name. Something shifted in her eyes and she blinked rapidly as though coming back to herself. She looked from Raffi to Mack to Priya, taking in their shock and disbelief before following their gaze to the body at her feet. She froze.

‘You killed him,’ Priya said, her voice a mix of terror and awe.

Shelley shook her head, eyes wide and fixed on the man, and slid one foot behind her, then the other, backing away.

‘I didn’t . . . I didn’t mean –’

‘You saved our lives,’ Mack clarified.

Raffi was still shaken. Still connecting the dots. Still shitting bricks, if she was honest. But she had been sending wishes into the dark her whole life: What if . . .? What if . . .? What if . . .?

And now, it seemed, the dark had replied.

‘What are you?’ she whispered.

She knew as soon as she asked that it was the wrong question. Shelley shuffled further back and hugged her arms across her chest, trying to escape the light, and Raffi understood that whatever else she might be, she was primarily a girl afraid. She raised her hands in Mack’s torchlight so Shelley could see what she was doing, and set the knife carefully on the ground. She kept her palms open, facing out, as she straightened and took a step towards her.

‘Are you okay?’

Shelley’s mouth worked, trying to make a reply, but no sound came out. She shook her head. No. Not okay. Her chin quivered and she hugged herself tighter as her body began to shake. Raffi realised Shelley was crying. Sucking deep, anguished breaths. She glanced back at Mack for guidance, but Mack looked as shocked as Raffi felt, and Raffi wasn’t sure what to do. Or, more to the point, what Shelley might do. She didn’t know if it was safe to approach. But it didn’t feel right to stand by either. Everybody needs a shoulder to cry on. Be brave. Raffi screwed up her courage and navigated a wide path around the man, then reached out a shaking hand to touch Shelley’s arm, letting her know she was there.

‘It’s over.’

Shelley turned to her, uncomprehending, and her skin burned fever hot through her pyjama top.

‘You’re safe now.’ Still moving slowly, Raffi circled her arms around her, loose enough that Shelley could pull away if she needed to.

But Shelley surprised her, sinking into the hug and clutching Raffi to her. Pain arrowed through her ribs and her heart rabbited. Shelley was filthy, covered in blood and gore, and the smell of the man’s insides was all over her. It felt like hugging death. Raffi wasn’t entirely sure she’d survive it. But even though it hurt – hurt so much she wanted to scream – she tightened her hold, letting Shelley know that she wasn’t going anywhere.

‘You’re safe,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve got you.’

Shelley sobbed harder. Her legs were jelly, threatening to give way and pull Raffi down with her, but a second set of arms closed around them, holding them up.

‘We’ve got you,’ Mack agreed.

Only Priya didn’t join in. She still had her torch fixed on the man. His blinded eye. His broken smile.

‘Not to break up the love-fest, you guys, but this isn’t over yet.’

MACK

Mack stood with her friends in a loose circle around the body. She knew the logical next step was to tell Mr Wallace so he could call the police. A man was dead. Multiple crimes had been committed. And grown-ups – ideally grown-ups with badges – should take charge of proceedings. The girl Mack was when she arrived on Retreat would already have been halfway to the Gatehouse. She would have trusted that telling the truth would lead to justice.

But Saints had been reporting Smiling Jack sightings for years – Ms Lim had seen him when she was a student – and it had never occurred to anyone that he might be something far more dangerous than a ghost. Even when Mack’d told Mr Wallace that someone had been in the lodge and Raffi showed him the mask to prove it, he’d dismissed it as boys being boys – they all had. Showing up bloody and bruised in the dead of night claiming that Smiling Jack was really a deranged clown posing as a ghost to scare the living shit out of them, precisely because he knew no one would believe them, would require one hell of an explanation. As would the fact that he had subsequently been killed. By Shelley. With her bare hands.

Even accounting for the moon-shot chance that someone with authority believed them, Mack wasn’t convinced going to the police was the smart choice. Shelley had come on Retreat to forget a dead boy. Mack remembered what she’d told her about Matthew the night before: He got what he deserved. The police hadn’t looked at Shelley closely then – she was too small, too weak to be anything other than a victim – but her proximity to a second violent death might give them cause to reconsider the evidence, no matter how improbable it seemed.

‘I vote we get rid of him,’ Mack said.

Priya nodded, grim faced. ‘Second that.’

‘Sealed. Who has the time?’ Raffi asked.

Mack checked her watch. ‘A bit after seven.’

Could it still be so early? She ran the maths. They’d found the man’s car around six. An hour. The whole ordeal had lasted an hour. It had felt like an age.

‘That gives us time enough to make him disappear,’ Raffi said.

‘How?’ Mack asked. ‘Do we put him in the lake?’

Raffi shook her head. ‘The sea. The lake water’s too clear and too shallow; someone would find him.’

‘You don’t need to protect me,’ Shelley interjected. She’d been leaning against Raffi, but now straightened up. ‘I did this. I’ll take responsibility.’

‘We did this,’ Priya corrected. ‘And none of us has a future with this on our résumé. This arsehole has messed with us enough; he doesn’t get to screw up our lives from beyond the grave, too.’

The plan, in the end, was simple. There was a pack of heavy-duty bin liners under the sink in the lodge. They’d parcel up the man’s pieces and weight them with rocks. Then they’d sluice down the track as best they could with buckets of water. There might still be stains, but no one knew the man had been there. And animals attack each other. Things die in the bush all the time. Whatever was left would be washed away with the next rain.

They would switch the power back on and shower. Soap the blood and dirt from their hair, put on clean clothes and tend to their injuries as best they could. When the hour grew late enough that they weren’t likely to meet another vehicle on the park’s main road, Mack (the only one of them who could drive manual) and Shelley would use the fire track to take the ute to the Cape Henning lookout and leave the keys in the ignition, making it appear abandoned. And they would feed the man’s remains to the tide.

Priya and Raffi would stay behind at the lodge to clean up. By morning, the story of this night – of a girl with violent gifts who slayed a monster, would be nothing more than a legend. A secret shared between friends.

Of course, the reality wasn’t so straightforward. Raffi tweezed five glass shards from Shelley’s hand and disinfected the wounds, but Shelley would need to have it sutured when they got back to the city. Raffi herself could hardly walk or stand up straight with her injured ribs. Priya’s ear was cut, and Mack’s throat was badly bruised. All four of them were grazed and aching. Working by torchlight. And a body, even broken down, is heavier than it looks. Some of the pieces didn’t fit in the garbage bags. The knife got bloodied after all. Mack was the only one with the remaining strength to wield it. She knew she ought to be disgusted by the task, but after everything the man had done to them, it was easy to see him as meat. Perhaps it was shock, though she didn’t think so. She was used to being the one who led the charge. Picked the battles. Her tongue was acid and her armour thick. And she had believed she’d always be capable of fending for herself. But the man had slid into the dark beside her and wounded her where it hurt most without her knowing he was there. It felt good to make herself useful. To cut him down to size.

She worked methodically, adrenaline carrying her through until she and Shelley heaved the final bag over the cliff edge at the Cape Henning Lighthouse. Distantly, she knew the man’s remains might eventually wash ashore, but the girls would be long gone by then. And they had no connection to him – he’d made sure of it. If the police found their fingerprints or strands of hair in his ute – and it seemed unlikely that they’d expend those kind of resources investigating an unregistered vehicle abandoned in a clifftop car park where people were known to jump – it wasn’t proof they’d killed him.

Before they left the clifftop, she reached back into the car to collect her bracelet from the rear-view mirror and slipped it back on her wrist where it belonged. The beads’ cool weight against her skin brought her back to herself. She became aware of the biting wind tugging at her hair and the thunder of waves below. It was long walk back to Baynton, and she felt hollowed out and exhausted. Ready to put the night behind her.

Shelley was still standing at the cliff edge, her posture hunched and tense. She’d hardly spoken to Mack on the drive – had hardly spoken to any of them. Mack crunched over the gravel to join her.

‘You ready to go home?’

Shelley nodded, her cheeks silvered and slick in the moonlight.

‘I appreciate you protecting me. I’ve never had real friends before, let alone the kind that will help me bury a body.’

There was an awkward pause as they both looked down to the churning sea below.

‘That is something people say, isn’t it?’ Shelley said. ‘That best friends are the ones you call to help you get away with murder?’

Mack realised that Shelley was attempting a joke, though her tone and timing were all wrong.

‘Oh sure,’ she shrugged, deadpan. ‘But I don’t recall committing any crimes tonight.’

Shelley grinned wide like a delighted kid, then turned serious again. ‘People don’t get close to me, Mack. I think they can sense what I am, even if they can’t name it. I’m sure you felt it, too, and it means a lot that you still gave me a chance.’

Mack shook her head. She hadn’t been a good friend to Shelley. Not really. If Mack was honest, she’d stood up for Shelley yesterday because she didn’t seem capable of handling herself, and when Shelley had really needed them that morning, they’d left her on her own.

‘We underestimated you.’

Shelley choked out a laugh. ‘No shit. I’m a monster.’

There was no denying that what she’d done was violent and shocking, but that term felt relative.

Mack nodded to the spot where they’d thrown the bags. ‘I met him twice last night. First while I was in the shower, and later in my room. Both times, he just walked right in. And I couldn’t prove that it happened. If we hadn’t found my bracelet, and if he’d stuck to the shadows instead of going full Michael Myers on us, I might have believed I’d imagined it. Without you, how do we bring a man like that to justice?’

‘I don’t know. I tried to fight him off the regular way when he first came at me.’ Shelley toed a pebble over the edge and watched it fall. ‘Matthew, too. The day he died at the reserve –’ she cut a sideways look at Mack ‘– the day I killed him, he tried to touch me and I told him no. Pushed him away. But he wouldn’t leave me alone. He was so big. And so strong.’

Mack wished she had Shelley’s ability. In the pool and on the lacrosse field she was all speed and muscle – the most athletic girl in their year – but the man had knocked her down and choked her breath, easy as squeezing sauce from a bottle.

‘How does it feel?’ she asked.

Shelley considered for a moment. ‘It’s hard to explain. I can’t just monster random people into oblivion at will. It’s more like a last resort. Or a fucked-up survival instinct. Like I only have the capacity for so much pain, and fear and rage, and if it tips past that point, it all comes rushing out.’ Shelley licked her lips. ‘It’s a release but not a relief, if that makes sense.’

Nothing about this night made sense, but Mack was doing her best to sit with the uncertainty. ‘Did you know you had it in you before . . . before Matthew?’

Shelley shook her head. ‘I always felt I was different, but not like that. I mean, it shouldn’t be possible, right?’

Mack wasn’t so sure. There was still so much about the human body, and more specifically about the female body, that remained unknown. Hell, doctors couldn’t even fully explain PMS. If mothers could grow new organs while pregnant and lift cars off trapped babies, it wasn’t such a stretch to imagine that girls might harness that same extraordinary strength to defend themselves. She rubbed her thumb across the beads of her bracelet and cast a final look at the sea. ‘It shouldn’t be necessary.’

PRIYA

Appearances might not be everything, but Priya knew that, for better or worse, they went a damn long way. Raffi could spin a story and Mack could handle the heavy lifting, but she would make sure they all came out of this looking squeaky clean.

Her mum had perfected the art of keeping house. She threw frequent dinner parties and, an hour before their guests arrived, the kitchen would always be chaos: ingredients and sauce spatter on the countertops, chair backs piled with tossed-off jumpers and scarves and Priya’s homework still spread over the dining table. The floors would be unswept, the toilet unbleached and her mother would still be wearing her ‘comfies’ and barking orders. Hell hath no fury like Priya’s mum in ugg boots. But when the guests arrived, every scrap of miscellany would be tidied away (including Priya herself when she was younger). Her mum’s dress would be fresh from the dry cleaners and there’d be a scented candle burning on the table in the entry way. The only signs of preparation were the curries simmering gently on the spotless stove, the rice keeping warm in the cooker and the fresh-baked naan cloth-wrapped in a basket beside an airing bottle of wine.

And Mrs De Sousa had trained her daughter well.

Priya sent Raffi to lie down with a dose of ibuprofen for her ribs while she tackled the area outside the lodge, smoothing the scuff marks from the clearing and scattering fresh leaf litter over the ground before sponging the man’s blood from the verandah steps with a bucket of cold, soapy water. That did the trick for the bloodstains on the living room carpet, too. She built a fire and dropped their ruined clothes into the heart of the flames, feeling a pang as she watched her new T-shirt catch alight. She’d fallen in love with its peachy colour and bought it specially for the trip, precisely because she knew it would look great in the photos they’d planned to take at the beach. Photos they’d never ended up posing for.

Raffi shuffled out to help when Priya came back inside and they cleaned the kitchen together, tiding up the broken glass and first-aid kit and opening the windows to air out the chemical smell. They’d need to own up to using the fire extinguisher, but it would be easy enough to invent a stovetop disaster. The stab mark in the table posed more of a problem. They’d probably have to fess up to wrecking it, but at least the damage was minor. Raffi set the kettle boiling to mop the floor while Priya scrubbed the chef’s knife and slid it back into its drawer. Then she found a mouse-nibbled box of baking soda in the pantry and mixed a few tablespoons with hot water in a small bowl to clean the key she’d extracted from the man’s eye. The mixture fizzed as it ate away the congealed blood and vitreous fluid and left the metal shining.

They were working on straightening the living room and were almost done – almost in the clear – when there came a knock at the door. Priya and Raffi froze. The couch was still skewed in the middle of the room, the carpet damp and Priya was on her knees gathering up the spilled pages of the welcome folder.

‘Priya?’

Jase. She barely had time to shake out her hair to cover her bandaged ear before he let himself in.

‘Hey – oh, hey, Raffi,’ he said, looking baffled as he stepped around the couch.

Raffi gave him a tight smile from where she was supporting herself against the hall doorway and pulled her dressing-gown tighter around her. ‘Hi, Jase.’

Priya straightened up. ‘What are you doing here?’

It came out more of a demand than a question, and Jase frowned.

‘When you didn’t show at mine, I figured I’d come to you. See what was happening.’ His confusion deepened as he took in their pyjamas and the disarranged furniture – the distinct lack of music, snacks and games – and his eyes settled on the bucket of pink-tinged sudsy water still sitting by the damp patch on the carpet.

‘What are you up to?’

‘Witchy shit,’ Raffi said, crossing her arms. ‘You shouldn’t be here, Jase.’

He half-laughed, as though unsure whether she was joking. ‘Yeah, because you girls are such sticklers.’ He turned back to Priya. ‘I thought we were going to hang out. You left your vodka last night. Maybe you and I can finish it?’

Priya’s stomach churned at the sight of the two-thirds empty bottle in his hand. She knew the man had left it. He’d wanted them giddy, questioning what they’d seen. More than that, he’d wanted to make their accounts unreliable. And to give them a reason not to tell.

‘I’ll be in the kitchen.’ Get rid of him, Raffi mouthed behind Jase’s back.

Jase flopped onto the couch and nodded at Priya’s hoodie and sausage-dog pyjama bottoms. ‘You weren’t planning on coming over, were you?’

She winced and shook her head; she’d forgotten saying that she might. Even if they hadn’t encountered the man, she wasn’t sure she would have gone.

Jase opened his arms for her to join him, but the thought of being so close made her feel claustrophobic. She perched on the edge of the coffee table instead, hands pressed between her knees.

‘What’s going on, Pri?’ He glanced around, again. ‘Where are Mack and the new girl?’

‘Night swimming,’ she improvised. ‘At the lake – it doesn’t matter.’ But knowing where they really were and what they were doing out there in the dark made her bold. ‘We need to talk about last night, Jase.’

He shifted his weight and rubbed a hand over his face, as though it were tedious for Priya to bring it up. ‘You said we were cool.’

‘Well, we’re not.’ She worked to keep her voice steady. ‘And I shouldn’t need to tell you that.’

‘Come on, we were both drunk –’

‘I was unconscious.’

He huffed a laugh. ‘You sound like Mack – did she put you up to this?’ He leaned towards her, his expression darkening. ‘Did you tell your friends? Is that why Raffi’s being a bitch?’

‘Heard that,’ Raffi called from the kitchen.

‘You’re interrupting our girls’ night,’ Priya said.

Jase shook his head. He wasn’t used to her being direct. Priya had always taken care to smooth over their disagreements before they ballooned to arguments, afraid that if she presented a challenge she’d lose him. Now she wondered if maybe the reason he liked being with her so much was that she never put up a fight. The thought turned her stomach: you’re too smart for this.

‘I’ll leave if I’m not welcome,’ Jase huffed.

Any other night she would have begged him to stay, fetched a pair of glasses from the kitchen and led him by the hand to her room. But not tonight. And not anymore. She was done reshaping her life to fit around his.

He sighed. ‘Jesus, Priya. You’re my girlfriend. I love you. And I want to be close to you. You’re supposed to want that, too,’ he reminded her, then lowered his voice and pouted in a way she usually found sexy. ‘It’s not my fault you’re irresistible.’

She stared at him. ‘Are you serious?’

‘What? It’s a compliment!’

‘No,’ she told him, slow and clear. ‘It’s not.’

‘Do I need to apologise? Is that it?’

It would be a start, she thought. ‘Are you sorry?’

‘Yes! I’m sorry!’ But he sounded more exasperated than sincere and threw up his hands, as though she were a puzzle he couldn’t solve. ‘What more do you want from me?’

‘Nothing. I don’t need anything from you, Jase.’ She hadn’t realised this was true until she said it out loud. But there it was: she didn’t need him.

‘We’re good then?’ he asked, sinking back onto the couch.

‘No. We’re done.’

He stared at her, incredulous. ‘Are you –? Are you breaking up with me?’

She nodded slowly, confirming it for herself as much as for him: yes. ‘I don’t think we’re good for each other.’

He slammed his hand against the wall. ‘This is BULLSHIT!’

Priya flinched but held her ground.

‘You’re throwing away everything between us because of one night when you were too drunk to handle yourself?’

The fact that he was trying to make what he’d done her fault only confirmed that she’d made the right choice.

‘Get out.’ Her voice was a broken whisper and her body shook with the effort of holding back her tears. She would not cry in front of him.

‘You’re crazy, you know that?’ Jase spat, standing so that he towered over her. ‘You haven’t thought this through. Who will take you to the formal? Intercol? Head of the River? What about the rest of our fucking lives, Priya? If you do this, I won’t take you back.’

Once upon a time, the idea of going stag to the formal would have been mortifying, but in that moment, she thought she wouldn’t mind. She’d have more fun dancing with her friends anyway, if she even went at all.

‘It’s time for you to leave, Jase.’ Raffi had returned from the kitchen and came to stand at Priya’s side.

He jabbed a finger at her. ‘Stay out of this.’

‘No. Priya doesn’t want you here and we have things to do.’

He turned back to Priya. ‘Are you going to let her speak to me that way?’

Priya shook her head. ‘Raffi’s right. You’re not welcome here, Jase.’

Jase slammed the door on his way out, muttering something about psychotic bitches. Raffi waited until his footsteps crunched away before taking his place on the couch, grimacing as she clutched her ribs.

‘That was . . . unexpected. You all right?’

Priya nodded, still shaking. ‘I didn’t know it would go like that.’ She sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘I thought we were happily ever after.’

‘Stories change,’ Raffi said gently.

Priya looked around at what remained of the mess. The initial shock of confronting Jase was wearing off and her heart began to ache. She felt small and adrift, but also relieved. ‘Yeah, I guess they do.’

She didn’t know what he’d tell people, or how they’d react, and it surprised her to realise that she didn’t care. It all felt so trivial after what they’d survived.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’ Raffi asked.

Priya shrugged. Being with Jase had felt like a seal of approval. Proof that she was worthy and loveable. That she belonged. It was hard to let that go, but not hard losing him. And that wasn’t right.

‘I think I confused wanting to be in love with the real thing. Sorry I was a bitch last night – I was in a bad place. It wasn’t about you.’

Raffi shook her head. ‘You told me you were in trouble. I should have believed you.’

More footsteps crunched on the gravel and up the verandah steps, and they both tensed.

‘Visiting hours are over!’ Priya yelled, thinking it was Jase come back for round two.

‘It’s just us,’ Mack said, putting her head around the door. She looked exhausted. Shelley, too. It was nearly midnight and none of them had slept much the night before. Aside from toast that morning and hastily made sandwiches at lunch, they hadn’t eaten either. Priya knew she shouldn’t be hungry – not after everything they’d seen. But she was starving.

‘I need a second shower. I can still feel him on me,’ Mack said with a shudder. ‘Everything good here?’ Her eyes found Raffi’s and her expression relaxed into a smile, like she’d arrived home.

‘Good as gold,’ Priya confirmed. ‘But we should eat. I’ll cook us something.’

‘God, yes! CARBS,’ Mack groaned. ‘And cheese. I’ll help.’

‘Nope. Not without a working fire extinguisher,’ Raffi said. ‘You shower; I’ll help.’

‘And I’ll make tea,’ Shelley offered. ‘If you want, that is?’

Priya shared a glance with the others and nodded, even managed a smile. ‘Tea would be great.’

She hadn’t been totally honest with Mack when she said things were all good. With everything that had happened, good felt a long way off. They were injured and hurting, still sorting through the mess. Priya suspected they would be for some time. But they had survived, and they were together – closer now than they’d ever been. In a few hours the sun would come up, and they would be there to watch it when it did.

EPILOGUE

US, TOGETHER

The new day dawned cold and clear. We were the last group to arrive back at the bus, but looking as good as we did takes time. Our clothes were clean and our lips were glossed. Our hair smelled of apples and apricots. The cramps, headaches and sore breasts we suffered for a week each month had made us experts at disguising a body in pain. We wore jeans and trackies to cover our scraped knees, painted our nails with Priya’s glitter polish and dabbed concealer on the bags beneath our eyes. Raffi crowned Shelley’s hair with silver butterfly clips, and Mack popped the collar of her rugby jumper and wore her hair loose over her shoulders to hide the bruises on her neck. She kept her arm around Raffi’s waist, helping her walk. The only visible injury between us was Shelley’s bandaged hand. It was unfortunate, but accidents happen.

Jase ignored us as we approached the car park. In fact, he made a point of saying ‘hey’ to Courtney Moore right as we showed up. Arsehole. But Sy gave us a little salute.

Ms Lim was back, along with Lachy Smalls who was boasting crutches and a leg cast. He was hopping around with a marker, collecting signatures while the teachers ran damage control. One lodge group had given themselves mild food poisoning trying to bake hash brownies, and someone had shaved off Hilary Mortlock’s eyebrows while she slept. Between her crying and students darting away to deposit their breakfast in the scrub, no one was much concerned with us.

Mr Wallace checked his watch and started corralling everyone towards the bus. ‘The road is long, and life is short!’ he called, quoting himself. ‘We roll in two minutes! I repeat: two minutes!’ He spotted us as we loaded our bags into the bus’s luggage compartment and joined the queue to climb aboard. ‘You appear to have made a miraculous recovery, Ms Martin,’ he said, fixing Shelley with an appraising look.

Shelley glared right back. ‘Yeah, my friends did a good job looking after me.’

‘We gave her a makeover,’ Priya added, slinging an arm around her shoulder.

‘Ah! And I see Smiling Jack returned the stolen bounty,’ Mr Wallace said, clocking Mack’s bracelet and putting Smiling Jack’s name in air quotes. ‘All’s well that ends well – am I right, Ms Whitmore?’

Mack gave him a thin-lipped smile over gritted teeth. ‘Something like that.’

‘Wait, you saw the ghost?’ Ms Lim’s brow furrowed.

‘Christ, don’t encourage them, Mei,’ Mr Wallace muttered.

Ms Lim ignored him. ‘What happened?’

‘We found our fourth, called the corners and bound his soul,’ Raffi told her. ‘He won’t be back.’

Ms Lim gave her a curious look. ‘You did what?’

‘Nothing, Ms Lim; Raffi’s seen too many scary movies,’ Priya said with a shrug, keeping her arm around Shelley as she nodded us towards the bus. ‘Let’s find seats before we get stuck with the pukers up front.’

Kyle Lynton overheard her, his head snapping up as we boarded, like a hound sensing prey, and a nasty grin spread across his face when he saw who it was.

‘Morning, ladies.’

We ignored him, but he rose from his chair and mimed using binoculars to inspect Shelley’s backside as we filed past. ‘No leaks today, new girl?’

‘Drink bleach, Kyle,’ Raffi shot back, as we slid into pairs of seats either side of the aisle.

His attention twitched towards her. ‘That’s Mack’s line.’ His gaze slid down to their joined hands. ‘Didn’t realise snark was an STD. You moved on quick, Vecchio. Not fussed which way the wind blows, then? Any port in a storm?’

Raffi’s face was fire. ‘Go to hell.’

‘Ooh, a curse! I’m scared!’

‘You’re a pig.’ Shelley’s voice was low and calm.

Kyle startled, as though he’d almost forgotten she was there, sitting beside Priya. She was watching him intently, and it was some time since she’d blinked.

‘Crack a smile, new girl,’ he said, putting up his hands in mock surrender. ‘I’m joshing with you.’

Everyone was aboard now and he looked around for his friends to back him up, but they were down the front, heads bent over empty shopping bags, trying not to be sick.

‘You want me to smile?’ Shelley asked in the same low tone. ‘After what you just said to my friend?’

Ms Lim settled into the driver’s seat and started the engine. No Doubt was playing on the radio.

‘Yeah,’ Kyle said, less certain now, whispering through the gap between the seats as Mr Wallace finished the headcount. ‘You gotta make an effort, new girl. Reckon you’d be almost pretty if you did.’

Around us, our classmates fired up their Gameboys and Discmans as the first drops of rain echoed on the roof and a peppery, peaty scent, like Covet and whisky, drifted beneath the saccharine cloy of Crown Mints and Lip Smackers.

‘All right, Kyle.’ Shelley leaned in close. ‘I’ll smile for you.’

Her eyes flashed as she stretched her lips wide, and we smiled with her, showing our teeth.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As a reader (and film buff), horror has always been my go-to genre. But writing horror has been a big gear shift, and this book wouldn’t exist without the support and expertise of many fabulous humans.

A huge thank you to my agent and fellow Kevin Williamson fan, Danielle Binks, whose novel, The Monster of Her Age, had me rewatching my favourite horror movies with fresh eyes, and who has championed this book from the beginning.

Thank you to my editor, Mary Verney, my publisher, Zoe Walton, and the wonderful team at Penguin Random House Australia who have shown such enthusiasm for this story, with special thanks to Christa Moffitt for the book’s stunning cover and to Claire de Medici for the eagle-eyed proofread.

A big thank you to Poppy Nwosu, who gave my short horror fiction that first crucial ‘yes’ and encouraged me to keep going down this dark, twisty path. And to my dear friend and mentor, the late Dr Ruth Starke, whose wisdom is always with me.

This Stays Between Us is, in part, inspired by a school camp to the ghost town of Inneston in Dhilba Guuranda-Innes National Park on the Southern Yorke Peninsula, and I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, the Narungga people, and their Elders past and present. I’m also incredibly grateful to Liana Skrzypczak and my sister, Jo McGovern, for sharing their Inneston ghost stories.

This novel is also a love letter to 90s horror films and the friends who watched them with me: Hannah Tolley, Victoria Phillipou, Sarah Frearson, Rachel Mellor, Nicola Harlem and Alina Berketa. Thank you for sitting by me in the dark.

Thanks also to Matt at Movieland Glenelg for countless recommendations and overlooking my late fees. And to the late Jim Jones: thank you for suffering our Hot30 Countdown mix tapes and introducing me to Hitchcock and Old Hollywood horror.

Thank you to my coven, Lisa Bennett and Hannah Kent. You witches make life magic.

And to my family: my wonderful parents, Phil and Maryanne, and my equally wonderful in-laws, Ron and Sonya, my darling husband, Alex, and our daughter, Frankie. Thank you for all your unwavering love and support.

All the pats and cheese snacks to my good boy, Stumpy, who naps faithfully by my side while I write. I couldn’t have done this without you, buddy.

And finally, a big thank you from the bottom of my heart to our passionate Australian YA community and to you, dear reader, for giving your time to this story.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margot McGovern lives in Adelaide and has a creative writing PhD from Flinders University. Her debut novel, Neverland, was shortlisted for the Text Prize and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and her short horror fiction has appeared in issues of The Dark and the Aurealis-Award-shortlisted anthology Hometown Haunts: #LoveOzYA Horror Tales. You can find Margot on Instagram: @margot.mcgovern

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First published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, in 2025

Copyright © Margot McGovern 2025

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.

Cover images: bushland: 1411/Shutterstock.com; grevillea: Tommy Atthi/Shutterstock.com

Cover design by Christa Moffitt, Christabella Designs

ISBN 9781761346293

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