The Hollows(32)

‘I want to go now,’ she said. Before she lost her nerve.

‘Now?’

It was seven o’clock. Still plenty of daylight left. ‘I want to get this over with, Ryan. I won’t sleep tonight if I have it hanging over me. I want to fix this so I can get on with enjoying my vacation.’

‘Okay.’ He shook his head. ‘At least if I die I’ll leave a beautiful corpse. And Glen Troiano might cry at my funeral.’

‘Shut up. No one’s going to die.’ But she laughed.

Five minutes later they were walking fast along the same path they’d taken the first morning here. They passed the clearing where the murder had taken place. Ryan asked her to slow down, but she couldn’t. She needed to get into town before she chickened out. Now they were actually doing this, she felt sick and cold inside. As they passed the spot from which the pony had bolted, the scratches on her back began to throb as if they remembered this place.

They reached Penance and stepped out of the woods, in the same spot as last time. The junkyard was down the road to their left. They headed right, just as they had before. She could hear the wind chimes she’d heard before, somewhere to the east.

They carried on in silence. Frankie wished it could be described as a companionable silence, but the tension between them was as thick as tar. She glanced at Ryan, at his long eyelashes, the fullness of his lips, his fringe flopping into his eyes, and she thought Lucky Glen Troiano.

‘I’m wondering how we’re going to find where they live,’ Ryan said. His voice was jittery, agitated. ‘Do you have a plan?’

She didn’t have a plan. They had reached the entrance to the street where they had seen the twins before. Paradise Loop. There were two smaller kids playing on a front lawn. A man further up the road was doing something beneath the hood of his car. Tinny rap music drifted from the open windows of a house along the street. Frankie looked up at the sky. The sun was beginning to dip and the edges of the clouds were turning pink.

‘Let’s ask these children,’ she said.

She walked purposefully up the street towards where the kids were playing. They stopped their game and looked up at her from the lawn. A boy and a girl, around six years old. They both had the same shaggy blond hair and freckles, and she realised they were probably twins as well. She suddenly had an image of a town where everyone was a twin; a place where all the children were born in pairs, like something from some spooky science fiction movie.

‘Hi,’ she said. She intended her voice to be bright, but when it reached her ears she sounded like she was teetering on the edge of hysteria. ‘Do you know a boy and a girl about my age who live around here? I think they’re twins.’

The two kids stared at her, unblinking, not speaking.

‘Do you know where—’

She stopped. The toys the children were playing with had caught her eye. They were dolls, the old-fashioned type, with realistic hair and staring glass eyes. They were coated in several layers of dirt, as if they’d just been retrieved from a dumpster. The dolls had been stripped naked, revealing their smooth, featureless bodies, and beside them was a hole in the lawn, dug with a pair of plastic spades. Both the children had soil-encrusted fingernails.

She started again. ‘Do you know them?’

The children stared at her, mute, and she felt Ryan arrive by her side.

The boy pointed to a house across the street.

‘Is that where they live?’ Frankie asked.

The boy nodded.

‘What are their names?’

‘Buddy,’ whispered the boy.

‘Darlene,’ said the girl. ‘You shouldn’t play with them.’

Frankie and Ryan exchanged a look. ‘Why not?’

‘They’re mean.’

‘They killed Milo,’ said the boy.

It was as if the temperature in the street had dropped several degrees. Ryan was staring at the kids. ‘Who’s Milo?’ he asked.

‘He was our cat,’ said the boy.

‘And Buddy and Darlene killed him?’ Frankie wanted to puke.

‘They buried him. They told us they buried him while he was still alive. They sat on his grave until he stopped mewing.’

Frankie tried to speak but there was no saliva in her mouth.

Ryan looked as sick as she felt. ‘Did you tell your parents?’

The girl shook her head. ‘They said if we told any grown-ups they would bury us next.’

‘Alive,’ said the boy.

‘They killed next door’s rabbit too.’

Frankie felt all the remaining blood drain from her face.

‘Took him from his hutch and carried him into the woods,’ the girl said. ‘We saw them.’

The children looked like they were going to cry.

Ryan tugged at Frankie’s arm. ‘We should go. I knew this was a bad idea. Buddy and Darlene are clearly complete psychopaths.’

‘Wait,’ said Frankie. ‘Was the rabbit white?’

‘Uh-huh,’ said the girl. ‘White and super cute.’

‘And did they say what they were going to do with the rabbit?’

‘No. But Buddy said if we told . . .’

‘They’d take us to him.’

Frankie and Ryan exchanged a look. ‘Who?’

The boy’s voice dropped to a whisper, and his eyes flicked nervously in the direction of the woods. ‘The man who lives in the woods.’