“Where?” Connor mouthed, his eyes narrowing on hers.
“My ten o’clock,” she whispered. Fear like a blistering frost crept into her stomach. Wide eyes spread around the circle.
With an eruption of sound Connor grabbed a flashlight and sprang to his feet.
“Hey, pervert,” he yelled with unlikely courage. He bounded out of the canopy and into the darkness, the light swinging wildly as he ran.
“Connor!” Pip called after him, disentangling herself from her sleeping bag. She snatched the flashlight out of Ant’s hands and took off after her friend. “Connor, wait!”
Shut in on all sides by spidery black shadows, Pip ran, snatches of lit trees jumping out at her. Drops of rain caught in her light beam.
“Connor!” she screamed again, chasing the only sign of him up ahead, a streak of light in the stifling darkness.
She heard more feet crashing through the forest behind her, someone shouting her name. One of the girls screaming.
A stitch was already starting to split her side as she tore on, the adrenaline swallowing any last dregs of beer that might have dulled her.
“Pip!” someone shouted into her ear.
Ant had caught up, much faster than she was, the flashlight on his phone guiding him through the trees.
“Where’s Con?” he panted.
There was no air left in her. She pointed at the flickering light ahead, and Ant took off.
Still, there was the sound of feet behind her. She tried to look around but couldn’t see beyond her own circle of light.
She crashed forward, breath sharp and shallow, light swinging at her side. She rounded a large tree and spotted two mismatched hunched figures, swerving before she crashed into them.
“Pip, you OK?” Ant said breathlessly.
“Yeah.” She sucked at the humid air, a cramp twisting into her chest. “Connor, what the hell?”
“I lost him,” Connor said, his head by his knees. “I think I lost him a while back.”
“It was a man? Did you see him?” Pip asked.
Connor shook his head. “No, I didn’t see it was a man, but it had to be, right? I only saw that they were wearing a dark hood. Whoever it was ducked out of the way while my flashlight was down, and I stupidly kept following the same path.”
“Stupidly chased them in the first place,” Pip said angrily. “By yourself.”
“Obviously!” Connor said. “Some pervert in the woods at midnight, watching us and probably touching himself. Wanted to beat the crap out of him.”
“That was needlessly dangerous,” she said. “What were you trying to prove?”
There was a flash of white in Pip’s periphery, and Zach emerged, pulling up just before he collided with her and Ant.
“What the hell?” was all he said.
Then they heard the scream.
“Shit,” Zach said, turning on his heels and sprinting back the way he’d just come.
“Cara! Lauren!” Pip shouted, gripping her flashlight and following Zach, the other two beside her. Through the dark trees again, their nightmarish fingers catching her hair. Her stitch ripping deeper with each step.
Half a minute later they found Zach using his phone to light up where the two girls stood together, hand in hand, Lauren in tears.
“What happened?” Pip said, wrapping her arms around them both, shivering, even though the night was warm. “Why did you scream?”
“Because we got lost and the flashlight smashed and we’re drunk,” Cara said, her face pale, pupils so wide that her eyes seemed to glow black
“Why didn’t you stay in the canopy?” Connor asked.
“Because you all left us,” Lauren cried.
“OK, OK,” Pip said. “We overreacted. Everything’s fine; we just need to head back to camp. They’ve run off now, whoever it was, and there are six of us, OK? We’re fine.” She wiped the tears from Lauren’s chin. It took them almost fifteen minutes, even with the flashlights, to find their way back; the woods were an entirely different place at night. Pip spotted the soft yellow glow of the battery lanterns from a distance, and her steps quickened.
No one spoke much as they cleaned up the empty drink cans and food wrappers around the sleeping bags. They dropped the sides of the canopy, safe within its four white canvas walls, their only view of the trees distorted through the plastic-sheet windows.
Pip’s chest still ached around her fast-beating heart, but the boys were already starting to joke about their midnight chase through the trees.
“Too soon, guys,” Lauren sniffed, drunkenly fumbling with the zipper on her sleeping bag. Pip could no longer bear to watch and helped her into it.
“I’m guessing no Ouija board, then?” Ant said.
“Think we’ve had enough scares,” said Pip. Cara nodded, chugging water and spilling it down her chin. Lauren was already passed out somehow; Zach, too, on the other side of the canopy.
When Cara’s eyelids began to wilt, dragged down by exhaustion, Pip crept back to her own sleeping bag. She saw that Ant and Connor were still awake and whispering, but she was ready for sleep, or at least to lie down and hope for sleep. As she slid her legs inside, something crinkled against her right foot. She pulled her knees up to her chest and reached inside, her fingers closing around a piece of paper.
Must have been a food wrapper that got caught. She pulled it out. It wasn’t. It was a clean white piece of printer paper folded in half.
She opened it up, eyes skipping across the words.
In a large formal font across the page: Stop digging, Pippa.
She dropped it, eyes following as it fell open. Her breath stalled. Disbelief staled to fear. Then the feeling crisped at the edges, burning into anger.
“What the hell?” she said, picking up the note and storming over to the boys.
“Shh,” one of them said, “the girls are asleep.”
“Do you think this is funny?” Pip said, looking down at them as she brandished the note. “You are unbelievable.”
“What are you talking about?” Ant squinted at her, sitting up and leaning back on one arm.
“This note you left me.”
“I didn’t leave you a note,” he said, reaching up for it.
Pip pulled away. “You expect me to believe that? Was this whole stranger-in-the-woods thing a setup too? Part of your joke? Who was it? Your friend George?”
“No, Pip,” Ant said, staring up at her. “Honestly, I don’t know what you’re talking about. What does the note say?”
“Spare me the innocent act,” she said. “Connor, anything to add?”
“Pip, you think I would have chased that pervert so hard if it was just a stupid prank? We didn’t plan anything, I promise.”
“You’re saying neither of you left me this note?”
They nodded.
“You’re full of shit,” she said, turning back to the girls’ side of the canopy.
“Honestly, Pip, we didn’t,” Connor said.
Pip ignored him, clambering into her sleeping bag, using her scrunched-up sweater as a pillow. The note left open on the groundsheet beside her. She turned to stare at it, ignoring Ant and Connor’s whispers for her attention.
Pip was the last one awake. She could tell by the breathing.
From the ashes of her anger, something new was born. A feeling between terror and doubt, between chaos and logic.
She said the words in her head so many times that they became rubbery and foreign-sounding.
Stop digging, Pippa.
It couldn’t be. It was just a cruel joke. Just a joke.
She couldn’t look away, though, her eyes tracing back and forth over the letters.
And the forest in the dead of night came alive around her. Crackling twigs, wingbeats through the trees, and screams. Fox or deer, she couldn’t tell, but they shrieked and cried, and it was and wasn’t Andie Bell, screaming through time.
Stop digging, Pippa.