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6M

p7

Camden Twine

By

Bibiana Burke

Synopsis:

Three years ago, on the remote island of Gofford, the body of a child was found. The last witnesses to have seen little Fay claim she was killed by mysterious bright lights from the sky. Far from rebuffing this explanation the hitherto impoverished locals embrace it as the truth and begin to aggressively market their community as a hotbed of all things supernatural. This bid to hide the truth  is made all the more desperate by the fact that their island home is eroding quickly into the sea.

 

When Simon, the young tourist who found Fay’s body, returns to the island, to find out what really killed her, he is drawn into the local’s latest scheme to keep their paranormal explanation afloat. He is torn between his longing to find the truth and his desire to help the people of the disappearing island. The latter desire is fuelled especially by his attraction to the teenager who first concocted the tales of bright lights, Camilla Denise Twine, or Camden. But when Simon realises the true extent of his new friend’s involvement in Fay’s murder, one word from Camden is enough to destroy the lives of everyone around her.

 

From Chapter 7

Simon pushed down his locking button and all the other car doors locked simultaneously, with a clunk.

 

“I’m not taking you off this island, Camden, until you tell me what really happened to that little girl.” He began, forthrightly. “If you were really serious about leaving the island then you’d tell me the truth - what really happened to that little girl.”

 

“You know what happened, Simon.” Camden replied, sounding shocked. “Everything I’ve told you already- you know!”

 

“You’re lying.” Simon accused her. “I know you’re trying to hide something. You had something to do with it! You were playing or something and she — perhaps she had a seizure and you thought — I don’t know what you thought- but you killed her or you pushed her into the sea, or you threw her in, to hide her! You made up those stories to explain why she’d vanished, and everyone got in on it because they knew it would save their livelihoods, if they had some myths and legends to sell themselves.”

Camden starred at him in horror for a moment. Then she began wrenching at the door handle.

 

“Let me go, what are you doing? Open the door!” She pleaded, picking frantically at the lock button.

 

“I heard you ask Orson something strange last time I was here.” Simon rattled on, trying to explain, as best he could. “That was why you asked him about death. You asked him about death and then you asked him a strange question. You asked him if something thrown into the sea would be washed up on the beach. I know what it was you threw into the sea, Camden. I found her, lying in a rock pool.”

 

But Camden was by now frantically winding down the back window. “I don’t understand what you’re saying!” She replied in a quivering voice. “You’re scaring me. I’m scared! You have to let me go!”

 

“I’m not just going to let you disappear in the middle of the marshes in the middle of the night!” Simon tried to say, trying to turn round in his seat.

 

In the mirror he could see Camden in the act of scrabbling out through the window. He unclipped his seatbelt and lunged round after her, flailing an arm between the front seats to grab her ankle. He caught her foot but she fell the rest of the way through the empty pane, down to the concrete and the momentum wrenched her free.

“There’s quicksand everywhere, you’ll kill yourself!” Simon yelled back to her. He burst out of the door in pursuit, staggering through clumps of grass and fallen walling stones in the darkness. He set off in the direction of the swift sloshing footsteps in the darkness and came up against a low wall.

 

“Camden!” He yelled, “Please! I know!”

 

Camden was dashed down to the concrete of the causeway and rolled over in the road. She couldn’t see the gashes and grazes that she began to feel and she had hit her head hard. Regardless she staggered to her feet and reeled. She flung herself over a  low wall, raced off across the marsh and was instantly subsumed into the darkness. As he gazed around hopelessly through the perfect darkness, Simon thought he saw a dark shape drifting on the right-hand edge of his vision.

 

“Camden?” He called to it. “Please! I know! I know about it! You can run, but it’s still true!” He staggered towards the form in the darkness. “I won’t hurt you... I’ll help you Camden!”

 

Simon ran round to the car boot and rummaged among the bags there. He turned back to the darkness brandishing a torch and used it to cut through the gloom, but there was nothing out there for the beam to alight on.

 

“Camden, please!” He called again, more desperate this time. “I’m not leaving without you!” But he knew this was a lie as he said it. Already the tides would be turning back for them and in a few hours the road would be an impassable quagmire, stranding him alone on the outskirts of the causeway.

 

“I don’t know whether you know these marshes as well as you say you do!” He cried to the emptiness. “But I can’t come and find you either! Can’t you see– I’m worried!” As he left the road, the ground grew softer, slurping and sucking at his feet. Soon he felt the cool trickling over his ankles and his clammy feet being doused as water seeped through his trainers. He waded on, until his calves ached with the effort of wrenching free his feet. He was only fifty yards from Tone’s car, visible out of the corner of his eye with its front and tail-lights piercing the misty darkness. Then, for an instant, the car lights were each blotted out in turn. It was as though a solid shape had silently cut across behind him, blocking out the light. He spun round in the same moment, hastily illuminating the ground there- but nothing- only the mists endlessly dancing in the wind.

 

All around him the darkness seemed to warp into human shapes, as he remembered the stories of the ghosts and the witchcraft. A terror began to creep into him and clench itself within. Now when he fancied he saw shapes moving just beyond the torch beam, he hardly dared calling to them, lest he alert some terrible spectre upon him. He shone the beam back onto the car and the road and he tried to flee, but the sand and mud still claimed his heavy feet. He looked down at them, slopping and dragging below and he began to will them feverishly to spirit him faster back to the car. The frenetic pounding in his chest was all he felt now and all he heard. His whole body tingled as thought the blood had frozen in his veins. Panic drove up like a gust behind him and gave chase. His arms and legs were brushed- by what he never saw-his hairs standing straight. Several times his will outstripped the speed of his labouring legs, and he careered forward, plunging into the sodden sand. Eventually his hand, dripping with mud, grasped the door handle of his car and he threw himself in, slamming the door behind him- expecting to hear a thud as his imagined phantom pursuers slammed against the windscreen.

 

He started, seeing his reflection sitting out in the darkness. Then he looked away as he thought he saw it contort, into a face, drowned, blue with bulging dead eyes. He tried to breathe deeply and exhale. The breath shuddered out, as tremulous as his aching legs and hands and his fingertips seemed to be pulsing beneath the mud. He wiped them impulsively down his front and finding that, to be equally coated, wiped them down his back.

 

Simon knew he couldn’t remain here, in this misty, mythic graveyard. Camden had bragged enough over her intimacy with this marsh. He wouldn’t brave it any further for her sake then. He thought of the men who had died trying to save pets from fires and frozen ponds only for the pet to survive.

 

The tide would be in by dawn and the drive would be treacherous enough.

 

Camden stumbled over a cluster of rocks and fell forward. She slapped into the face of a steep incline and flattened herself against it, sheltering from the sweeping beam of the flashlight. From behind the beam, Simon’s faint voice was calling, whipped from coherence by the gale. She watched the torch sweep through the air and swing round like a lighthouse beam.

 

She took off again…