Soul Storm (19 page)

At the top there’s a newsletter Mum subscribed me to, with uni reviews by students. Going to college is the last thing I care about now. I scroll down to find the original Soul Beach
invitation. It’s there, at the bottom of the page.

In red?

I try to open it, but it won’t work. The heading –
Meggie Forster Wants to See You on the Beach
– is in italics, and I try everything: right-clicking, highlighting,
closing my email program and starting it up again. But it still won’t work.

My breathing is rapid, blood is rushing in my ears.

‘Lewis? Lewis!’

He comes running, perhaps hearing the panic in my voice.

‘It’s frozen!’ I shout, when he’s next to me.

‘The Beach?’

‘No. This.’ I point at the screen. ‘There’s only one route onto the Beach – the invitation I was sent by my sister. And I can’t open it!’

Lewis frowns, takes hold of the mouse and tries the same things I did to open it, to move it, to right click. ‘I think it’s . . . expired.’

‘Expired?’

‘Mmm. That’s why you can see it was there, but can’t do anything with it. Like, I dunno, the shadow of what was there.’

Or the ghost, I think. ‘Why would that happen?’

He sighs. ‘It would have been set to do that when it was sent. By the original sender. Perhaps the invitation was only meant to last a certain amount of time.’

The original sender. In other words,
The Management.
But how would they have decided when to make it expire? They couldn’t have
known
this would happen, could they?
Perhaps this was always going to be their final trick: taking the Beach away from me as though it never existed.

‘But you could get the message back, surely? Hack into it somehow?’ I plead.

Lewis shakes his head. ‘Because you’re on webmail, not a standalone program, any files won’t be cached. Plus, if they’ve taken the trouble to set an expiry date, whoever
they
are, then I doubt they’d be lax enough to then let you access the site via a deleted email.’ He spreads his hands out. ‘I don’t know what to say,
Ali.’

I grab the mouse back from him and try all the same things again, in an increasingly manic cycle, until my hand looks like a claw on the mouse. He doesn’t try to stop me. He knows me too
well by now, knows that I won’t give up, can’t give up, till I accept there’s no chance.

‘Unless it’s something Danny did when he said goodbye,’ I say.

‘Danny?’

I shake my head. I hadn’t meant to say his name out loud. ‘It’s nothing. No one.’ I feel guilty at dismissing someone who meant –
means
– so much to
me, yet it also seems disloyal to mention him when I’m with Lewis, who has done more than I could ask of anyone. ‘Lewis. Help me. I don’t know what to do.’

For the first time since I took my initial walk along Soul Beach, I am completely lost. I have no more evidence against Sahara. No way to talk to my sister. No clue about how to resolve her
death, or Danny’s, or the tragedies of a hundred lost souls who must surely still be . . .
somewhere
, in their own personal limbos.

Lewis takes my hand and leads me to the huge sofa by the fireplace. ‘
I’ve
been thinking – since last time. I mean, it might be nothing, but . . .’

‘Go on. I’m in a grasping-at-straws frame of mind.’

‘OK. So we established in the scan that the Beach exists, somehow, in some other dimension.’ He laughs. ‘Listen to me. “Other dimension”. I’ve always taken
the piss out of Trekkies, and now I sound like one.’

I smile. ‘Welcome to my world.’

‘What if the Beach is a real place?’

‘I thought that’s what we’d already worked out.’

‘No. There’s a difference. A subtle one, but what I’m thinking is, what if the place itself – the landscape, the sea, the geology – what if they’re based on a
genuine beach?’

I understand what he means now. ‘Somewhere on earth.’

Lewis nods. ‘You know I only caught the tiniest glimpse of the place but it seemed so real to me.’

I know how hard it’s been for him to accept that he saw it for real and it makes me even more excited. ‘You think they’re really there?
The Guests?
That there’s
a place we could even visit . . .’ I don’t dare say any more; it seems too good to be true.

He shrugs. ‘Maybe. Or it might be that I’m losing my grip. Listen, Ali, this whole business is unknown territory for me. I’m totally out of my depth. But I can’t see
anything else left for us to try.’

I close my eyes, trying to imagine seeing my sister, holding her, hugging her again at last but this time for real.

Ninety-nine per cent of me knows it is too good to be true. But after all that’s happened, how can I stop the tiniest part of me believing in this wonderful, life-changing idea? Especially
as it’s Lewis who’s said it, the most logical person I know. ‘How would we find it?’

Lewis walks across to his desk, fetches two pens and two brand new, leather-bound notebooks. ‘We start offline. We write down everything we can remember about the
physical
aspects
of the Beach. Separately, so we won’t be distracted or muddled. OK, your observations will be more useful, but I might as well join in.’

‘And also about the Guests – the people?’

‘I didn’t see any people, remember?’

Like me, the first time I saw the Beach.

Lewis crosses the room and begins to write with his shoulders hunched, as though this is an exam in which I might be planning to cheat.

I take my pen. It’s almost painful to revisit my memories. My first thought is of the idyllic Soul Beach, but then it’s replaced by the wasteland I saw the last time, with uprooted
palms and polluted sea.

I try to remember both versions, before and after I made it all go wrong. As I write, I have to rub at my eyes so that I can see the ink and the page.

Did my sister hurt herself as she clambered up? Or is she as insubstantial as any other ghost? I try to focus and keep writing . . .

Well, nothing except Danny, a single guilty soul, haunting the shore. But I don’t want to tell Lewis about him. I have a powerful sense that something else happened
before the fire started, before Lewis dragged me out of the lab. Something huge. But I can’t remember what it was, though I can remember fear. Awe. What the hell was it I saw?

‘You done?’ Lewis is holding out his hand for my slip of paper.

‘Yep. Now what?’

‘Now we compare notes.’

I sit down next to him at the desk where he lays the two pieces of paper next to each other. I’ve never seen his handwriting before. It’s rounded and regular, more flowing than I
expected. Easy to read, even with my swollen eyes:

I feel the paper slipping through my fingers but I do nothing to stop it. ‘Oh, God, Lewis. You really
did
see it.’

He’s still staring at my list. ‘We saw the same place. Reading this, there’s no doubt. I’m a rationalist, Ali. Everything has an explanation. But I’m
lost.’

I know how that feels. ‘Sorry. It’s my fault.’

He says nothing for a moment, but then he puts the list down and reaches out for my hand. ‘Yeah. Because you really asked for your sister to be murdered and then to be drawn into some
bonkers world of conspiracies and dead–alive people.’

His hand is warm as he squeezes mine. But I’m still missing something. I close my eyes and try to fast-forward through my last emotional goodbye with Danny. The storm, the thunder, the
lightning, the sea . . .

The sea.

That’s what I’d forgotten. What I saw that made me terrified, but awe-struck, too.

The way it drew back from the shore as Danny held me tight. The sight of the sand beneath, oily and dark. That powerful sense that I was seeing something monumental.

And the strange familiarity. I couldn’t work out why it would remind me of something, until now.

I open my eyes again. ‘You think it looked like Asia?’

Lewis nods. ‘Maybe. I mean, I’ve only been to that part of the world once – on a stopover from Kuala Lumpur.’

‘Malaysia?’

‘I stayed a couple of days. Coast, city, then on to Australia. But there was something about the landscape that reminded me of your Beach. Still, we have to narrow it down. Asia is a
pretty big continent.’

‘I might know how,’ I whisper. ‘When I was in the scanner, something strange happened, right at the end. I thought it was the same storm returning. The sea was pulling back
from the shore. It’s only now that I’ve realised just what it was.’

‘What?’

‘A tsunami. We watched a programme in geography about the Boxing Day one. The survivors all said that the first thing that happened was that the water disappeared. Then, of course, minutes
later it came back, and destroyed everything. Perhaps this is the final act in the drama. The complete destruction of Soul Beach.’

Lewis takes his hand from mine and tears at his hair. Thinking.

‘Or perhaps it really happened, right, Ali? Somewhere in Asia?’

I look into his eyes. ‘Could be. In which case . . . it might be easier to find. Will you help me look for it?’

I’m close enough now to read his face, despite my blurred vision. I see worry in his eyes, but something else too. Resignation? Or even a hint of excitement.

‘Nothing would stop me now, Alice Forster.’

And I realise I couldn’t ask for a better companion.

What’s the phrase? Weak as a kitten.

But appearances are deceptive. Just as I am not what people see, you are not as weak as you seem. A kitten has claws and teeth and the hunting instinct of a tiger passed
down in her genes. And you have hidden strengths.

If only I could convince myself that you are vulnerable, represent no threat. Then life could go on as normal.

If only.

I wake on Saturday, feeling a hundred per cent better.

And a thousand per cent more restless. So much energy, but nothing to channel it into. I’m missing Meggie, trying to think of ways I could help Danny, wishing I could be working alongside
Lewis, but I am still being monitored twenty-four seven. It’s like living in a very cosy police state.

All I can do is wait for Lewis to play his part.

‘Sweetheart, can I have a word?’ Mum says after breakfast. Then she sits me down and tells me that my next appointment with Olav is on Monday, with another session on Friday. Plus on
Saturday morning we have family therapy to look forward to. Repeated every week till I’m cured.

Even the thought of tormenting my least favourite shrink with mind games doesn’t soften the blow. ‘I don’t get any say in it?’

My mother’s face is stern. ‘Not this time. I’m sorry, Alice. You need specialist help, urgently. Without it, we can’t send you back to school. And if you don’t go
back to school, then there’ll be no university and—’

‘What about Dad? Is he behind this?’

‘He agrees that we need to tackle this head-on now.’

‘So why isn’t he here?’

Mum examines her nails. ‘Look, Alice. If your father had his way, you’d already have been to the GP and be on God knows what kind of cocktail of drugs for depression or anxiety. I
persuaded him to try this first. But if you aren’t willing to commit, I don’t think I’ll be able to keep you away from the medical approach.’

I gulp. No way. I need to stay sharp. Dumbing me down with drugs would be exactly what Sahara wants.

If it is Sahara.

Of course it is. There is no one else it could be.

‘So will you go, Alice?’ Only now does the desperation creep into my mum’s voice.

I nod. What choice do I have?

Sunday. Three a.m.

The text wakes me:
May have found the Beach. Or, at least, somewhere that looks identical. When can we meet?

I read it a hundred times. Click out of my texts and back, because part of me can’t believe it’s real. That Meggie might be there, wherever ‘there’ is, waiting for
me.