The Lost Village(16)

“I saw someone,” she says, and I can’t tell if she’s very pale, or if all of us look like monochrome ghosts out here in the square.

“There was someone there,” she says, turning to look back at the school.

“Where?” Robert asks. “In the school?”

Emmy shakes her head, puts her hand on the base of Robert’s spine, and steps toward him, seemingly subconsciously.

“No,” she says. “Here in the square. In front of our van.”

Her voice is thin and scratchy. At first I think it’s from irritation or sarcasm, but then it dawns on me that it’s fear.

She’s afraid.

“What exactly did you see?” I ask, suddenly very conscious of all the dark windows staring down at us, of all the dark alleys winding out of the square like threads in a cobweb. So many empty spaces. So many walls to hide behind.

Stop, I tell myself. There’s no one here.

Emmy looks at me.

“I woke up,” she says. “I heard something, so I got up to see what it was. There was someone standing in front of the van, looking at me.” She swallows.

“Did you see who it was?” asks Robert.

“No,” says Emmy. “It was too dark. It was just a silhouette, but it was definitely a person. I could see their eyes. They were looking straight at me.” She swallows again.

“Whoever it was, they saw me.”

I shake my head, my skin crawling.

“It might not have been anyone,” I say. “It sounds a little like sleep paralysis. People often see hazy dark figures watching them when they’re just waking up and the brain—”

“I know what a fucking sleep paralysis is, Alice,” Emmy hisses, interrupting me. “This wasn’t it. I was standing up. I was awake. I saw them.”

I open my mouth to reply, but then freeze. There, on the other side of the square. By the corner of the school. There’s someone standing there.

A slim, dark figure. Unmistakably human.

I try to say something—anything—frenetically tell myself: There’s no one here. There’s no one here. There’s no one here.

But the figure doesn’t disappear when I blink.

It starts walking toward us. I’m the only one who’s seen it—both Emmy and Robert are facing me. And in that moment, I make an unexpected and unwelcome discovery about myself. I’ve always seen myself as the sort of person who would be proactive in a crisis—the one to run, scream, fight—but now, when it actually comes down to it, I can’t even get a word out to warn the others.

But then the figure steps into the moonlight, and its features fall into place.

My knees turn to jelly, and I can’t help laughing out of pure relief.

“What the fu—” Emmy begins, her face contorted in a mix of outrage and confusion, but I point over her shoulder.

“Tone!” I call out, just to make sure.

She replies:

“Oh. Hey.”

She’s bundled up in her jacket, her long, bare legs sticking out of a pair of rubber boots. When she stops a few feet away from us, I can make out the bleary look in her eyes, the shock on her face.

Tone looks at Emmy, and then me, and says:

“This some sort of midnight conference?”

I shake my head.

“I think you gave Emmy a fright,” I say. “Did you go to pee?”

“Yup,” Tone says. “But what do you mean?”

“She must have seen you walking across the square,” I say. “She thought she saw someone staring at the van.”

Emmy still hasn’t said a thing. She studies Tone with narrowed eyes.

“Oh,” says Tone. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Did you stop in front of the van?” Emmy asks, her voice hollow.

“No,” says Tone. “Or—I don’t know. I hadn’t quite woken up. I might have been looking around to see where to go.”

“You were right, Emmy,” I say with a shrug. “It wasn’t sleep paralysis. But it was no ghost, either.”

I yawn into the back of my hand. The combination of the rude awakening, fear, and then relief has brought a new wave of tiredness rolling over me.

“I never said it was a ghost,” Emmy says without looking at me, a certain roughness to her voice.

“What I saw was standing still,” she continues, now looking at Robert. “It was staring straight at the van. At me.”

My exhaustion makes me snap.

“Oh, come on,” I say. “You’d just woken up, you saw Tone, freaked out, thought you were seeing some mystical being, and screamed. It’s not so hard to explain. Now let’s go get some sleep—we have a long day tomorrow.”

Emmy’s face is a mask of jagged shadows. I don’t have the energy to hang around and let this turn into an argument.

When I’m almost back at the tent I throw a glance over my shoulder at the vans. Emmy and Robert are still standing there, shadows glinting in the night. Robert has put his arm around Emmy’s shoulders, and it looks as though Emmy is saying something to him, but she’s whispering so quietly that I can’t hear. Both of them are looking up at the school.

I turn and climb back into the tent.