Hollow Pike (11 page)

‘You’re right, I was daydreaming,’ Lis admitted. Then she grinned. ‘And I forgot you used to be a geek! Tell me, Danny, what am I meant to be doing?’

‘Yeah, yeah . . . keep it quiet. We’re meant to be proving how a change of state won’t affect the mass of the chemical components.’

Lis bit her lip and shook her head slightly. She squirmed, not enjoying her ignorance in front of Danny.

‘It’s easy,’ he continued. ‘Weigh your little pot, then burn off the magnesium and your pot should still weigh the same.’

‘Oh, I get it. Even though you can’t see the magnesium, it’s still there.’

‘Exactly. The homework essay is all about car exhaust fumes. Our test shows how damaging the fumes are to air quality. If your pot doesn’t the weigh the same, the test has gone wrong
somewhere – probably the lid wasn’t on tight enough.’

Lis smiled broadly as Danny’s train of thought galloped away with him. She was reminded of her epiphany in Kitty’s attic. She was pretty sure Danny couldn’t talk like this
around Cameron or Bobsy for fear of ridicule. Maybe that was where that little bit of sadness in his eyes came from.

‘Are you laughing at me?’

‘No, it’s great! Cool, rugby team Danny Marriott is secretly Science Boy!’

He turned, looking around himself, now clearly paranoid. Lis knew the importance of concealing your cleverness only too well. Clever isn’t cool.

‘Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. I’m the girl who sold her imaginary baby on eBay, or whatever, remember?’

He stifled a laugh. ‘Oh, yeah, I forgot about your secret past.’

‘You didn’t believe it, did you?’

‘God, no! I thought that Laura had finally lost the plot. It was bound to happen sooner or later.’

Lis giggled quietly, aware that Dr Maloney was on patrol not far away.

Danny went on, ‘But seriously, watch yourself around Laura. Her little mates are scared of her for a reason. I’m a bit scared of her myself to be honest . . . and hanging out with
Kitty and Delilah won’t help.’

Lis frowned. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Danny’s eyes widened. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I really like them. I went to primary school with them, but all those rumours . . . People say they worship Satan! Pretty dark
stuff!’

Lis forced a smile to remain stretched across her face. Did Danny really believe that stuff? The cold possibility that Danny was no better than Cameron or Laura flitted through her mind.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Come on . . . They are pretty weird. If you hang around with them, people will take the piss.’

‘I think that’s the difference between you and me, Danny,’ Lis stated calmly. ‘I just don’t
care
any more! I can’t pretend to like someone as vile as
Laura. You can hang around with those muppets if you like, but I’m out.’

Danny looked like a kicked puppy and she wondered if she’d gone too far, but at that moment, Dr Maloney drifted by. Lis grasped her beaker and headed off to find the weighing scales,
leaving Danny hanging at the workbench, dumbstruck as she walked away.

School was a more comfortable purgatory now that Lis didn’t dread break times any more, and the weekend came around with fantastic speed. Jack worked for a few hours each
Saturday in Fulton at the dubious sounding Bagelicious and Delilah had explained that, to keep Jack from killing himself, they usually stopped by for a while to ease his boredom.

After they’d eaten, the girls trotted down the high street. It was a tragic scene. A number of the shops were boarded up entirely, while others stood in various states of ruin, with faded,
chipped signs creaking in the wind. They had passed at least three bargain shops which proudly declared that all stock was ‘Only £1!’ (or in one case ‘Only 99p’). Each
of these stores had piles of tacky merchandise stacked up outside.

There seemed to be one large restaurant – an Italian called Luigi’s – which represented every Italian racial stereotype known to man and looked like it hadn’t been
decorated since the eighties. There were also a disproportionate number of pubs for such a small town. So far, they’d passed The Cloven Hoof, The Slaughtered Lamb and The Green Man.

‘That’s why all the shops are so knackered,’ explained Delilah, waving at all the pubs. ‘Friday night is like Sodom and Gomorrah down here.’

‘Sadly lacking the sodomy,’ Kitty joked. ‘Seriously, though, Friday night is Fight Night!’

Lis glanced around sadly. ‘Aren’t there any good shops?’

Kitty and Delilah said ‘No’ in unison and then doubled up laughing.

‘Well, there’s obviously Bagelicious. Classy place! Oh, and there is one quite nice coffee shop on the top floor of the book shop.’ Kitty pointed across the street.

‘Tomorrow we could go into Leeds,’ Delilah suggested. ‘My dad owes me some money.’

Kitty had some sort of family meal so she couldn’t go, and Lis wasn’t sure she could afford the long journey when she had so much homework to do. They talked about a trip for next
weekend instead, and Lis was glad to feature in their future plans. It was reassuring.

There was one last stop on the tour. Kitty and Delilah had promised to save the best for last. They headed down a curving, cobbled side street that twisted away from the main shopping centre.
Past a couple of olde-worlde looking shops, they reached their destination. This part of town felt more authentic. Here was a proper Yorkshire town with a baker, a blacksmith and some tiny
second-hand bookshops. It was a shame more of Fulton wasn’t like this. In fact, Lis realised, they had almost walked back into Hollow Pike.

‘Oh, no. Look who it is,’ Delilah whispered.

Across the street was Laura. God, she was the last person Lis wanted to see. Lis immediately tensed up, subconsciously hiding behind Kitty. Her foe was arguing with a handsome man who had
closely-cropped silver hair and a Riviera tan, her father perhaps?

‘Check out the domestic!’ Kitty chuckled.

Although they were out of earshot, it was apparent that Laura and the gentleman were having a fiery disagreement. Laura looked hot and teary, even stamping her foot stubbornly at one point. She
spat an insult into the man’s face, but this was the last straw. With a heavy hand, he seized her arm and dragged her towards a midnight blue BMW parked in one of the side streets.

Even from where they were, Lis heard Laura scream a curse.

‘Come on. Let’s not get involved,’ Delilah said and pulled Lis away by the hand, but in Lis’s stomach there was now the familiar hybrid feeling of hatred and fascination
she only associated with Laura Rigg. Heads down, they swiftly made their way along the cobbles.

‘We’re here!’ Delilah presented a run-down looking shop with a grimy net curtain and a sign on the door reading ‘Friends of the Church’. Lis guessed it was a
charity shop, although what really caught her attention were the two terrifying mannequins in the window. One was bald and missing an arm, and you could still clearly see that its companion had
empty eye sockets, despite the wig that covered most of its face. Both were wearing hideous floral dresses.

‘You have got to be kidding!’

‘No!’ Kitty squealed. ‘Wait and see . . . It’s amazing! I promise you’ll find some buried treasures.’

The two girls took her by the arms and thrust her through the front door, a dainty bell signalling their arrival. The smell of musty old clothes and mothballs hit Lis in an invisible tsunami.
She fought the urge to gag.

‘You don’t even notice the smell after a minute,’ Delilah hissed, reading her mind.

The shop was in hazy darkness, only tiny shafts of light filtering through the filthy net curtains. Clothing hung off rails and junk was piled all around in recycled tea chests. Bric-a-brac was
stuffed into any available space, while mounds of books filled every corner. Like the TARDIS, the shop was somehow bigger on the inside. Kitty was right, though – despite the smell, Lis found
herself in an Aladdin’s cave.

‘Afternoon, ladies!’

All three jumped as a strange vision appeared behind the counter. The shopkeeper was hard to age; she was buried under a ton of bad make-up and a huge blonde wig. Lis’s mouth hung open:
this woman looked half human, half clown.

‘Hello, Mrs Gillespie,’ Delilah said politely. ‘How are you?’

The figure waved a jewelled hand around the shop. ‘You know how it is, darling. So much to do, not enough time to do it!’

The three girls nodded.

‘You won’t think I’m rude if I carry on folding scarves, will you?’

‘Not at all.’

Mrs Gillespie slowly took a scarf from a teetering pile and neatly folded it before selecting another. Lis doubted whether folding scarves would help rescue the shop from its current state of
chaos.

Kitty took her hand and they slowly advanced to the back of the shop.

‘You know her?’ Lis whispered.

‘Yeah, we shop in here a lot.’

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Delilah read her thoughts again, ‘but if you look close enough there’s some fabulous retro stuff here. All the desperate housewives
were young and cool in the seventies and eighties and they’re always having clear outs.’

‘OK, I’ll start digging!’

‘Enjoy!’ came Mrs Gillespie’s shrill voice. Lis wondered if she’d heard every word they’d said.

Once again, her new friends had been spot on. In amongst some hideous fashion relics there were some cool pieces that suited Lis’s new metropolitan style down to the ground. But the most
fun part was the changing room: basically a corner behind a curtain. The three girls quickly organised a fashion show for each other. Taking it in turns, they would take armfuls of clothing behind
the curtain. Some were genuine purchases, but mainly they chose the most grotesque, comedy-value items they could unearth. One second, Kitty would emerge from behind the veil in a giant peach
bridesmaid dress, and the next Delilah would crawl out in a PVC catsuit. The eighties power-suits were something else! Lis laughed so hard her ribs ached.

‘What do you think of this?’ she asked, strutting around in a little red trench coat. It was the boldest blood-red she’d ever worn and, while it wasn’t her normal style,
she was feeling brave.

‘So cute!’ enthused Kitty. ‘Very “rainy day in Manhattan”!’

‘You
have
to buy that!’ Delilah agreed.

‘Excellent!’ Lis smiled, basking in the sunshine of friendship.

As Delilah and Kitty searched for a winter coat for Kitty, Lis broke away and started to look at the books and gifts. Most of the stock consisted of ancient crockery or glass ornaments that
looked a lot like they had been cleared out of dead pensioners’ houses, a thought that made Lis uneasy.

She ran a finger across a stack of dusty books topped with three copies of the
Spice Girls 1997 Annual
. At the very bottom of the tower was a huge hardback entitled
An Occult History
of Hollow Pike
by Reginald J. Dandehunt. Any relation to Ms Dandehunt? Lis wondered. She pulled the heavy tome out, careful not to let the whole pile tumble down. How many Dandehunts could
there be in such a small town?

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she set the ancient book down in front of her. Turning to the publisher’s page, she could see that the book had been published in 1922. It was an
heirloom! Lis grinned at the pencilled price of £1.75. She wondered what it would fetch on one of those BBC antiques shows.

She made a mental note to ask Ms Dandehunt if her granddad had been called Reginald, and then started leafing through the book. Lis adored old photographs – as a child, she had genuinely
believed that the past had been black and white. She immediately recognised Hollow Pike village. From a distance it looked almost unchanged by time: the copse, the winding roads, the cobbled
streets. What was noticeably different were the people: they stood in front of old houses and shops with blank, austere faces.

Apparently it was true, Hollow Pike did have a supernatural history. She flicked to a page entitled
Early Witchcraft – The Reformation and Beyond
. No photos here, only curious
paintings and etchings. They showed hags shoving chubby infants into a bubbling cauldron, laughing as they did so; boils and plagues; whole fields of dead cattle – all supposedly a result of
witchcraft. One image showed nude women – witches – dancing around fires.

Flicking further in, the book grew darker still with drawings and etchings of pentagrams and goat-headed demons. Sinister words like ‘blood rites’ and ‘sacrifice’ jumped
from the page, and there were haunting images of animal offerings and strange altars where crones stood entwined with gleeful demons. Lis remembered enough from RE to know how Christianity had
demonised pagan practises, but the images disturbed her nonetheless. Her eyes lingered on a more recent photograph of four hooded figures, standing arms aloft, worshipping some unseen deity. But
what brought the sting of tears to her eyes was the background: a tiny stream was clearly visible in the picture. It was the stream in Pike Copse. The stream in her nightmares.

‘What you looking at?’

At Kitty’s voice, Lis slammed the book shut. ‘Nothing,’ she said instinctively, ramming the book onto the nearest bookshelf.