Dead Scared (20 page)

No.

Jessica half ran, half fell to the door of her room. It was locked, of course, she always locked it at night, but the key was right there, in the lock, all she had to do was turn it, take hold of the handle and pull the door open. The lock turned, the handle was slick with sweat and the door would not open.

She tried again, checked the key – it looked the same – pulled on the handle, even banged on the door a couple of times. Then she turned and ran to the window. She half fell across her desk and pulled at the curtains.

The window wasn’t there. In its place was a photograph of the head and torso of a circus clown, large enough to fill the entire frame. Jessica had always been scared of clowns, but even she had never imagined one like this. The huge red nose, red and white cone-shaped hat and royal-blue ruff could, at a pinch, have
belonged
to a clown who wouldn’t scare a child to death. But no parent would ever expose her child to a clown with a face that long, bony, yellow and old, with a grinning mouth so huge, so full of yellowing teeth, with opaque white eyes, rimmed in black and scarlet. No child could see this clown and keep its sanity. Jessica thought she was probably about to lose hers when she heard a soft tapping sound behind her.

Still half lying across her desk, she turned. The door to her wardrobe creaked and swung open. Standing inside was another clown. This one was worse, far worse. This one wore a mask that was white as a winter coat, with a huge, animal-like mouth and hooked red nose. Only the eyes looked human.

TO MY SURPRISE
, Talaith was in our living room when I got back, her tiny bottom perched on the chair, feet up on the desk in front of her. She was dressed for bed and, judging from the relatively steady way she was painting her toenails black, was sober. Her hair wasn’t quite the shade of purple I remembered from the previous evening. More red, less blue, bit more of a plum shade. She waved a mug at me. ‘Coffee?’ she offered. ‘It’s instant shit but I’m broke as usual.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it, though. You’ll smudge.’

While I filled the kettle, found a couple of mugs and put instant coffee in them, Talaith finished her artwork, raised her feet off the desk and waggled her toes in the air, supporting herself entirely by stomach muscles. She had to be sober. No drunk could manage that.

‘Someone asked me about Bryony today,’ I said, when we’d exchanged the usual social pleasantries about the sort of day we’d had and how I was settling in. ‘That must have been really grim for you.’

‘Worse for her,’ said Talaith. I inclined my head. Difficult to argue with that one.

‘Do you know how she is?’ I asked.

‘Better today,’ said Talaith. ‘I visited. I think she knew me. The nurse who came in said they thought she might pull through.’

Something on Talaith’s face made me think that wasn’t necessarily good news.

‘She’s going to be very badly disfigured,’ I tried.

Talaith shook her head. ‘She won’t cope. She was gorgeous before and she couldn’t cope. Take looks away from someone like Bryony and she’ll have nothing left.’

‘Sounds a bit harsh,’ I said.

‘Realistic,’ Talaith insisted. ‘You wouldn’t believe the hours she’d spend on her appearance. Or the money, come to that. She was paranoid about wrinkles. At her age, most girls are just grateful they’ve outgrown zits.’

‘Not sure I have yet.’

‘All the photographs she had around the place were of her,’ Talaith went on. ‘Not family, mates, boyfriends, just her. And they were all those arty-farty studio shots, you know, soft focus, tons of make-up. Sometimes I’d catch her just staring at herself in the mirror.’

‘Sounds like you didn’t get on too well,’ I said.

Talaith shrugged and drank coffee. Mine was still too hot to touch. ‘She wasn’t too bad when she first got here,’ she said. ‘Bit highly strung, nervy. Easily bruised flower is what my mum would say, but to be honest, a lot of people here are.’

‘Really?’

‘God yes. When you think about the pressure we’re all under to get a place at any decent university, let alone here, it’s a wonder we’re not all basket cases by the time we arrive. Bryony was bright enough, but she was no rocket scientist. I think she’d been coached and hot-housed and pushed all her life. Not too bad, though, no worse than a lot.’

‘So what went wrong?’ I asked.

Plum-coloured hair danced around as Talaith shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t around too much. I was having a good time and it was obvious we weren’t going to be soulmates. She got a bit freaky, though, towards the end.’

Freaky? Nicole had got freaky too, according to her college-mates. Or what was the phrase they’d used? Well weird.

‘Freaky how?’ I asked.

Talaith looked as though she wasn’t sure how much to say. ‘She had bad dreams,’ she opted for.

That didn’t sound too bad, until I remembered that Nicole Holt had also had bad dreams shortly before she killed herself. ‘Naked-in-public bad dreams or blue-lizards-crawling-out-of-the-walls bad dreams?’

‘Well, that’s just it, she couldn’t really tell me. When I was here – and you’ve probably noticed, I’m not here that much – she’d wake me up moaning and screaming. One time I found her in the room here.’ She nodded towards a spot on the floor. ‘Very early in the morning. She was stark naked, huddled up, crying and yelping. Woke the whole block up. It was like one of those night terrors you hear about kids having.’

‘Was she taking something?’ I asked.

‘Well, that’s what we thought, to be honest, which is why we didn’t call an ambulance. One of the boys sleeping over was a third-year medical student. He checked her heart rate, her pupils and everything and we put her back to bed. I sat in the doorway until I could see she was more settled.’

‘And in the morning?’

‘She felt like shit, couldn’t remember a thing. That was the worst episode, but I’m not sure she was getting any real sleep towards the end. Kept talking about noise in the night, people talking, phone calls waking her up. Have to say, it never bothered me.’

‘I heard the police found evidence she’d been smoking something pretty powerful the night of the accident. Did she do that a lot?’

Talaith looked down at her toes for a second, then reached out and rubbed away an imaginary smudge. ‘Not that I saw,’ she said. ‘But she was pretty jumpy about people going into her room, so she could well have had something to hide.’

‘Who would go into her room?’ I asked.

Talaith shrugged. ‘She thought I was coming in at night, while she was asleep,’ she said. ‘She talked about how things were being moved round. How she’d go to bed leaving things in a certain way and when she woke up they were different.’

I figured I’d pushed as far as I could for now. My room-mate was a long way from stupid. I sat back in my chair, finished my coffee and stretched my arms behind my head.

‘So why does everyone but the vicar call you Tox or Toxic?’ I asked.

‘Family nickname,’ she replied. ‘My older brother gave it to me on account of my unusual flatulence as a kid.’

‘Oh?’

‘Don’t panic. I outgrew it.’

‘So what are you studying?’ I asked her, expecting something like psychology or sociology. Talaith (Tox) had shown a pretty thorough grasp of the human psyche.

‘Aeronautical engineering,’ she told me, then laughed at the look on my face. ‘I am a rocket scientist.’

I laughed and we said goodnight.

That was the night I started having dreams.

Thursday 17 January (five days earlier)

I WOKE UP
late, feeling like I’d aged a decade overnight. I got out of bed and my body told me to get back in right now. Couldn’t be done. I had a lecture at nine and I’d have to hurry to make breakfast.

Tox was just getting back from the Buttery when I opened the block’s front door, wondering how long it would take me to get used to walking through freezing January air to get hold of a bowl of cornflakes. She held eye contact for just a second longer than seemed natural. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How you doing?’

‘Good,’ I replied. ‘You OK?’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ she replied, emphasizing the
I
. At that moment, another girl left the block in a hurry and Tox stepped inside. I made my way to the Buttery, pushed open the door to the main building and joined the straggling remnants of the queue, wondering if getting out of bed had been the right decision after all. My mouth was dry, my throat felt as though I’d swallowed wire wool and my eyes could barely stay open. I hadn’t drunk alcohol last night but this felt like the worst hangover ever.

Then the room went dark and the floor seemed to fall from beneath me.

*

‘You all right? Can you hear me?’

‘Can someone get a chair?’

I was on the floor of the Buttery serving area with no memory of having reached the front of the queue. A boy and a girl were crouched next to me; behind the counter several kitchen staff looked more interested than concerned. Nothing they hadn’t seen before.

A chair appeared and I let them lift me up and put me on it. ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I said to the pale-faced girl with scarlet glasses who’d helped lift me. ‘Don’t miss your breakfast. I’ll just stay here for a bit.’

Gradually, they left me alone. An older, kind-looking woman behind the counter offered me a drink. After a few minutes I felt better.

I caught Tox just as she was about to leave.

‘Sorry about last night,’ I said. ‘Did I scare you?’

She shook her head, but didn’t quite meet my eyes. I’d scared her. ‘It must have been talking about what happened to Bryony,’ I said. ‘It must have been playing on my mind. I don’t normally dream at all.’

She glanced at her watch. It was ten minutes to nine. She’d have to rush to make nine o’clock lectures. ‘Bryony could never remember anything in the morning,’ she said.

‘I didn’t at first,’ I said. ‘I just felt rough, like I’d drunk too much and slept too little. It started coming back to me just now.’

‘What?’ she said.

‘I was awake,’ I said. ‘In my dream, I mean. But I couldn’t move. I knew exactly where I was, I just couldn’t move a muscle or open my eyes. And someone was standing over me, watching me. Was I noisy?’

‘Not as bad as Bryony could be,’ Tox replied.

But bad enough, judging by the look on her face.

‘I remembered something about Bryony’s dreams,’ Tox said. ‘There was this one time when she was sobbing that someone had cut her face to ribbons, that blood was pouring out of her. It wasn’t, of course, she was perfectly fine. Just freaking out.’

At that moment my phone buzzed. A text from Evi wondering if I could see her at noon, in her rooms. There was something she needed to talk to me about.

‘I’ll see a doctor this morning,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it’s just being in a new place, talking about what happened to Bryony and that business with the boys on Tuesday night. But if it happens again, I’ll move out.’

At that, Tox looked a little ashamed of herself. Which was exactly what I’d planned. ‘You don’t need to do that,’ she said.

‘You should go,’ I said. ‘Thanks for being so sweet. I’ll catch you later.’