Читать книгу The Next Killing - Rebecca Drake - Страница 9

At night the lights go out and the school rests. From the sky, spotted by low-flying planes, it looks like some great coiled beast, the peaks of the rooftops like scales on a dragon’s back.

Lights must be out in the dormitories at ten; that is the rule and that is the official end to the day.

The first day was over. The hustle of moving in, the rush of old girls finding one another and the stress of new girls finding their way around—all of this noise was absorbed by the stone buildings and dissipated into the woods surrounding them. The day was over and everything that has happened now slipped into the past.

At night the school rests, but not everyone. There was movement in the dark hallways. Hours have passed. Those who were watching waited and then wait some more. Fifteen minutes after midnight they slip out of the doorways from different houses. They are used to carrying their shoes and stepping silently. They are used to pulling hoods over their faces.

Out of the houses they came, silent figures moving through the darkness. They don’t speak until they’re past the buildings, until they’re in the shelter of the trees.

“Hurry,” one of them said. “We’re late.” She held a small flashlight pointed at the ground. A round beam of light, eight inches across, is all that guides them. Still, they are used to this. They found the path they needed and moved along it.

“How do you know she’s even going to be here?”

“I heard her telling someone.”

Their feet crunched quietly against the crushed limestone, but they didn’t worry. No one will hear them out here, well, maybe not no one.

They found her near the pond. She was taking off her clothes slowly, piece by piece, and they watched her in the darkness. One of them giggled as the girl stripped off her bra and panties, adding them to the pile of clothes she left on the bank. She didn’t hear, though, because she was moving toward the water.

“You couldn’t pay me to swim in there,” one of them whispered only to be hushed by the others. The girl looks as if she might agree, lifting her foot out as soon as she put it in, obviously cold, her pale arms wrapped around an even paler torso. But this was only for a second. In the next, she stepped into the water, moving forward until she was swallowed by the dark liquid.

“What’s she doing? Where did she go?” A hiss in the silence.

“Ssh, there she is.”

Up again, emerging from the water like a sylph, like Venus, her hair hanging about her pale shoulders as she stood for a moment. And then she began to swim, careful strokes with her head above the water. She floated on her back and they could see that she was staring up at the sky. She was saying something. She was talking to the moon.

“God, she’s so weird.”

“Where’s the rope?”

She doesn’t see them until she’s swimming back to the shore, until she’s stepped forward in the soft mud of the bank, until it’s too late to run, too late to do anything but scream.