Dead Girls Read online

  This is a Genuine Rare Bird Book

  Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Abigail Tarttelin

  First published 2018 by Mantle an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to

  print, audio, and electronic.

  For more information, address:

  Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  Set in Dante

  north american epub isbn: 9781644281017

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Tarttelin, Abigail, 1987–, author.

  Title: Dead Girls / Abigail Tarttelin.

  Description: First North American Paperback Edition | A Genuine Rare Bird Book | New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA: Rare Bird Books, 2019.

  Identifiers: ISBN 9781644280362

  Subjects: LCSH Girls—Fiction. | Girls—Crimes against—Fiction |

  Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Revenge—Fiction. | Detective and mystery fiction. | Ghost stories. | BISAC FICTION / Ghost | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General

  Classification: LCC PR6120.A487 D43 2019 | DDC 813.6—dc23

  for the real dead girls

  We were so wholly one I had not thought

  That we could die apart. I had not thought

  That I could move,—and you be stiff and still!

  That I could speak,—and you perforce be dumb!

  I think our heart-strings were, like warp and woof

  In some firm fabric, woven in and out;

  Your golden filaments in fair design

  Across my duller fibre.

  Edna St. Vincent Millay

  Contents

  Dead Girls

  28 January 2000

  Acknowledgements

  Reading Group Guide

  Dead Girls

  The walls are bare, cold, like a hospital. She paces to the locked door and then back to the wall.

  The space is 3.5 meters wide, 5 long. Not really enough to live in. The window is barred, and soundproof. It looks out onto a large courtyard surrounded by low office blocks, built in the seventies, pale-painted. Above them is the sky, blue and unmarked. She knows where she is, but not where the rest of the world got to. There is a bed, low and slender and hard. The mattress is thin.

  She stops pacing; drops to the floor. Fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, repeat three times. Now the combinations. Front, reverse, backhand. Left hook, right hook, left uppercut, right. Front kick, side kick, roundhouse. She turns. Front kick, this time with the left leg, side kick, roundhouse. Left arm leading, front hand jab, reverse, backhand. Repeat. The temperature of the small room rises with her body heat. The sweat drips down between her breasts. Left hook, right hook, uppercut, jab.

  The day the door opens, Thera will be ready. She will be prepared.

  We wanted to contact the dead, just to see who was around. It was a still, humid July day, the kind where the sweat trickles down your back under your T-shirt, and we had exhausted ourselves playing tag in the churchyard, among the graves. That must have been where we got the idea. We ran back to my house and dug out an old Ouija board from J17 Magazine that Billie and I had glued to cardboard and left in my bookshelf.

  The five of us tramped across the wheat fields toward the copse. Around six o’clock in the afternoon, the wind suddenly picked up. I watched the breeze move the wheat, and then lift the backs of Billie’s and Sam’s blonde hair. On Fridays, my village gang stays out through teatime and has supper late, so Billie, my little brother Sam, Hattie, Poppy, and I were all there at the copse. We crawled on our bellies down the long entrance tunnel to the den and sat in a circle, our backs to the bushes. We must have all felt the significance of the moment, because we lit our candles in silence. My mum had dug out one for each of us before we left the house. “Don’t play with these,” she’d warned, handing me the matches.

  I’d rolled my eyes, for show. Hattie was watching. “Yeah, I know, Ma.”

  We closed our eyes. I asked the spirits to come forth. We waited. Billie repeated my demand, louder. We opened our eyes, looked at each other, and felt a spark go between us. There’s always been magic between Billie and me. We can make things happen. We opened our mouths at exactly the same time and repeated the words Billie had spoken, together. “Come forth, dead things, and speak to us your will!”

  Suddenly there was a scream. It was Poppy, and then Hattie, and then Sam was screaming too. Billie and I were grinning at each other, but then I looked at Sam’s face. He leapt up, staring just to the right of me, into the bushes at the far side of the den.

  “Thera!” he shouted as Billie stood up too. I turned. It was just over my shoulder. A large black dog, snarling, baring its drool-slicked white teeth and mottled pink-and-black gums. It barked twice, loud and savage.

  I froze.

  I don’t react like everyone else to fear. When everyone else is panicking, I’m in a little bubble of stillness. Once, when she was giving a presentation at school, Hattie fainted. I think she was nervous. I hadn’t been paying attention because I was reading a book on my lap under my desk, but everyone else gasped, and that was when I noticed she’d fallen down. I stood up immediately, walked past our teacher, put Hattie in the recovery position, and told Billie to fetch a glass of water.

  The black dog was almost near enough for me to reach out and touch. Everyone else was screaming and running toward the tunnel and crawling through it. But I was as still as the ground I sat on, watching the dog advance, thinking about how to defend myself against it. Scared but ready. Terrified, but with all my faculties at my disposal.

  Sometimes I feel like I am built for the bad times, and that’s a thought that does actually shake me up. Who wants to be built for the bad times? To know the right place for you is a place no one else wants to be?

  In the end, I only moved because everyone else had already disappeared, crawling as quickly as they could back through the tunnel, and running until they got to a tree you could climb really easily. I was last, and even then before I left the den I turned back: I had this weird idea that the dog wasn’t bad, that it was there to warn us about something, but when I turned I heard more barking. Behind the first black dog another sprang from the bushes, and then another, so I ducked into the tunnel and followed the others. The dogs were big, like Alsatians or Rottweilers, but they didn’t look like any dog I’d seen before. Maybe they were what we had called forth with the Ouija board.

  I ran until I reached the tree and then I climbed up it, past the others, right to the tip of one of the branches. I didn’t hold onto anything, and I don’t remember wobbling. The others said afterward I looked like a witch, or a wood sprite.

  “Did you see?” I said. “There were more of them. Look, now there are four.”

  I stood there and stretched my neck up to see into the empty den through the leaves.

  “I can’t see four,” said Hattie. She was sat on a branch, a little higher up than the others. Maybe she could see into the den from where she was. “I can only see one.”

  I shook my head. “There are four.”

  I’ve never tried to contact the dead before, but I’m pretty sure savage black dogs are a sign that trouble is coming. Then I thought I saw blonde-brown hair through the trees in the den. It was a girl. I saw an eye. “Look!” I shouted.

  “Wh
at?” Billie, Sam, and Poppy said together.

  “Stop shouting, Thera!” That was Hattie. She looked down to the others. “It’s just the one dog. There’s nothing else there.”

  The girl with the blonde-brown hair looked at me, and then she was hidden by the trees again, and a voice, a cold whisper, murmured in my ear: “Death is near, Thera.”

  Until then, the week had been a normal one. On Monday Billie and I pretended that we were twins. It’s a game we often play, because we look similar. We have long blonde-brown hair, blue eyes, and are the same height. Billie is prettier than me and I am smarter than her, but we are both equally funny. On Wednesday we both raised our Nano Pets up to two years old. Nano Pets are the same as Tamagotchis. It’s a little baby on a screen in this egg-shape thing you keep in your pocket. You raise the baby until it dies of hunger or pooing too much or until it gets to three, when it’s completed. Then you get a new baby, which is zero years old. It occurred to me that perhaps they’re supposed to teach us to take care of something other than ourselves, so we talked about Sam and I asking for a kitten at Christmas, and then we made up imaginary pets and chased them all over the playground.

  That day we had talk assembly. It was about bullying. Hattie turned to me and said that she was bullying Poppy. Bullying Poppy! I snorted. What about me, for heaven’s sake? She’s always mean to me because she wants Billie to be her best friend. Poppy wants Billie to be her best friend too. It mostly doesn’t worry me because Billie and I are two peas in a pod but sometimes it worries me because Billie is too nice to see what they’re doing. Even Mrs. Adamson likes Billie best out of everyone. She’s our teacher. Billie always plays along with Mrs. A liking her, but Billie and I think Mrs. A is pathetic. She was stroking Billie’s hair on Wednesday afternoon and making us late for home time, so I started singing our home-time song loudly, and Billie joined in, and I pulled her out of the classroom, and we went to get our reading folders and coats from the coatroom. Our home-time song goes: “TIME to go HOME, TIME to go HOME, ti-i-i-i-i-i-ime to go home!” It’s from Watch with Mother, which is a black-and-white video for babies.

  Everyone wants Billie, but she’s mine.

  “Why are you bullying Poppy?” I asked Hattie in talk assembly.

  “’Cause she’s annoying,” Hattie replied, then paused for dramatic effect. “I don’t think she deserves to be in the gang.”

  I frowned. “But you probably don’t deserve to be in the gang because you’re a bully.”

  Hattie leaned into me, hissing. “She’s sitting with us, the Year Sixes, and she deserves to be with the Year Fives, because she’s a baby.”

  I rolled my eyes, but not so she could see. I get so tired of her meanness that I go home crying some days. Most days I don’t want to go to school. I just go so I can see Billie.

  At lunchtime on Thursday, Billie started to feel ill. I was telling her about how, when we say Grace, which we have to do before we eat, we say, “May the Lord make us truly thankful,” and I love lunch so I was telling her I guess I’m truly thankful. Just as I said this, she sneezed on me. It was really funny, but she kept sneezing all day, and then she felt really tired. It turned out she had the flu. I felt very sorry for her. I stood by her when she was putting things away in her drawer. I didn’t know whether to ask her if I could do something. I felt silly just standing there.

  So, apart from Billie being ill, this week was completely normal until yesterday, when the girl no one else could see spoke to me. And then today.

  This morning, Saturday, about ten o’clock, I was up and dressed and reading on my window seat, waiting for Billie. From my window, I can see out over the fields, so when I saw her run down the hill into the field behind our house, I went downstairs to help her climb over the back fence. She put one leg over the top, and I pulled her overalls until she rolled over to my side. Then she started falling, and I wasn’t in enough time to catch her, and we both fell kind of clumsily into the hedge.

  “D’OH!” she yelled, like Homer Simpson. Did I mention that Billie is ridiculously loud?

  When we went in the kitchen, Mum was there, taking food and cleaning things from Tesco’s out of shopping bags and putting them away.

  “What’s for tea tonight, Mum? Can Billie stay?”

  “Spag bol and yes.”

  “Scrumplicious!” Billie yelled. “I love spag bol.”

  “I know you do, chicken.” Billie is ’round here all the time, so Mum is used to her loudness. She’s like Mum’s third child.

  I didn’t know where Dad was that morning. I didn’t think about it at the time. Probably out in the village, at his carpentry workshop. Billie and I were planning to play running away, but we made the mistake of telling Mum, and Mum said we had to take Sam. I whined a bit. It’s a little annoying that he has to come everywhere with us when I just want some alone time with my best friend. But he’s a good brother anyway, and he always plays the games we want to play. He’s very amenable. Granddad taught me that word; he said it reflected better on me than me saying, “He does everything I tell him to do.”

  Billie had brought ’round her backpack, and I put mine on too. We packed them with two Rice Krispies Squares, our diaries, two pens (green and red), Dad’s compass, our Nanos, and three Ribenas (one for Sam, but there were only two Rice Krispies Squares). We ran away into the village pretending that the Huns were following us, but Sam started to whine about how fast we were running and how he couldn’t keep up, so we stopped on the corner near Hattie’s. Billie said why didn’t we go and see if she wanted to come out and play. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t think of an excuse that wouldn’t make me seem mean, so I followed Billie and she knocked on Hattie’s door. Hattie opened it. Poppy was behind her, in the dark of Hattie’s hall.

  “Hi, butthead!” Billie said cheerfully, and then giggled for a long time. She’s weird like that. “Want to come out with us?”

  Hattie slurped on her Um Bongo straw. “Sure. What are you guys doing?”

  “We’re running away,” I said, a bit nervously but trying to sound nonchalant. Hattie always makes fun of my games.

  She snorted. “I won’t do that, but we’ll come out with you guys.”

  It got a lot less fun with them there. We just wandered around, talking. They don’t like to play. We went back to the den, but there was nothing there. No dogs. No girl. Hattie called me a liar. I got more and more annoyed. I hate how Billie doesn’t see Hattie for what she really is.

  About three o’clock it got really hot, and Hattie was complain-ing loads, so we stopped and drank the Ribenas and sucked sweet nettle juice out of the white bits off the nettle plants in the hedgerows. That was when I saw the man.

  We were on the verge near the school, lying on our tummies in the grass by the road. The horse field was behind us, and the air smelled of hay and flowers. The crickets were chirping loudly and Sam was trying to catch one in his hands. I was writing in my diary and Billie was ripping paper out of hers to make a paper predictor, so we would know who we were going to marry. We had split our Rice Krispies Squares and were just finishing off the last bites. Suddenly the man came over the stile.

  “Get down!” I whispered, urgently.

  We all put our heads flat in the grass. All of us apart from Hattie.

  “Look at that man!” I said. “He’s alone, and in dark green. He looks like a German spy.”

  “A Nazi, eh?” said Billie. “Or maybe a Jap.” She had just finished the Famous Five book I had lent her. They were written in the war.

  I grabbed her arm. “Let’s follow him! And document his movements!”

  “His bowel movements?” Billie said crazily, and cackled.

  “No, his spying movements, you dolt,” I said, and clapped her on the head.

  “Mm, but it’s so comfy and nice here on the grass,” Billie argued. “And I’m getting that tanned back-of-the-neck that I’ve
always wanted.”

  “Yeah, I don’t want to play, Thera; you’re being dumb,” Hattie said.

  “Yeah, I’m getting a nice tan on my neck too,” added Poppy. Poppy is horrible at telling when people are joking. Billie doesn’t care about getting tanned, or about makeup, or the other boring stuff Hattie and Poppy care about.

  “Come on, butthead,” I said to Billie. “When I get pulled out of school by MI5 and sent to a secret school for geniuses, you are coming with me. And you know the only way you’ll qualify for that?”

  She sighed. “Fieldwork! Come on, Watson,” she said to me. “We must be at our most vigilant!” She made imaginary binoculars with her hands. “He goes that way!” She pointed down the road. We packed up our bags quickly.

  “Let’s follow him on the other side of the hedge!” I said. “He’ll never suspect a thing!” Billie crowed. “Come on, Sam!”

  Sam helped us collect our litter, but Hattie grumbled. “Forget it, I’m not going to follow some stupid man. He’s probably going to the pub.”

  “Yeah, me neither; we’re staying here,” Poppy agreed.

  “One of us could go up to him and question him,” I said. “Find out who he is while the others lie in wait!”

  “Indubitably!” That was Billie.

  Hattie sighed. “I’m going to go home. You can come back to mine for dinner if you like,” she said to Poppy, as if she didn’t care one way or the other.

  “Okay,” said Poppy. I rolled my eyes.

  They went in one direction and Billie, Sam, and I ran in the other after the man, but stealthily, so he didn’t see us. He was pretty tall, and had broad shoulders and brown hair, like Dad. You could tell he was quite muscular. We couldn’t tell his age, though. We followed him down the lane to the bench on the green grass triangle in the middle of the village, where the roads intersect. He sat down on it and started to eat something. Suddenly the man looked over his shoulder. “Hey!”