We don’t have a planchette, so we use one of Jenny’s plastic guitar picks. It’s the right shape, but too small for all of us to press our fingers together, the way you’re supposed to. It’s fine though. We’re good at taking turns. The board was easy to make, just the lid we’d torn off an old pizza box, still a little greasy, the scent of pepperoni and onions lingering. Jenny had used her favourite lip liner, Crimson Wave, to scrawl the alphabet first. The name always made us snort, like hadn’t they spoken to a teen girl before coming up with that? Then we added the numbers, and yes, and no, spaced out at the top, and also, maybe, because Sarah said it might be nice to give them that option too. Hanna said we should add goodbye at the bottom, so we could close the session, or so they could. But we knew the truth. She wanted to add it because we never got to say it to them for real. 

A girl a day, that’s what we thought at first. For a while, back in the beginning, they kept us in school, where we sneaked sums in the back of our exercise books. But the math didn’t add up. There was no logic to it, to any of it. One classroom. One teacher. We ignored him. Swung in our chairs, flicked through magazines, mostly we daydreamed, about our old friends, our old lives. Others stayed home as if their parents could keep them safe, as if anyone could.

Jenny plucks her fingernails along the guitar strings and we look up, our heads nodding as one to the song we might once have danced with a boy to, bodies close, arms wrapped, mouths and tongues waiting. We leave the pizza box then – they never answer anyway – settle into our chores while Jenny sings. Her voice cracks on the high parts, and not in that cool folk singer-wavery way, but we don’t mind. We hum along, grateful for the noise. We collect up cans, bottles, cigarette butts, health ed lessons a distant memory. We tie all the trash together into black plastic bags that we leave piled at the back door. 

We don’t go outside in the dark.

Sarah gathers up all the scattered magazines, their pages creased and folded. They fall open at the places where they’ve been read the most – You Won’t Believe What This Celebrity Looks Like Shirtless, 10 Ways To Bring Yourself To Orgasm Without A Man (between us we’ve tried 8). Sarah flicks through them, as if there might be something, some new quiz she hasn’t answered a hundred times, some model without a graffitied face, then stacks them on the table nearest the window, curtains closed, always. Hanna gets down on all fours, pulls up the rug, scrubs at the old stain. We let her do it. The edges have faded to a brown ring, but there’s still a dark spot in the middle. We learned later to use salt first because it dehydrates, if you put it on while the stain is still wet, it takes everything in. Toni told us, but not straightaway because she was embarrassed that she even knew, embarrassed that her periods couldn’t be contained. Back when we were still squeamish about blood. 

Jenny stops singing, only she hasn’t reached the end of the song. Sarah and Toni are holding each other, Toni with her face leaning on Sarah’s chest, her eyes closed, peaceful. We know the warmth of each other’s bodies. Know the scent of each other’s necks. Know that Jenny has a broken tooth at the back of her mouth that she cleans out after every meal and packs with gum, that Sarah has a mole on her left collarbone, right where Toni’s forehead is pressed against her now. The two of them still shuffle their feet, as if they weren’t moving to the song anyway, but something inside them. The rest of us look at Jenny. Her mouth is dragged down, cartoon-wide, which she never does, because of the tooth, and we follow her eyes to the other shuffling sound in the room, and we see the guitar pick, moving, moving.  

We’re fast. Desperate. We watch the guitar pick, slowly. It stops, rests on yes, though nobody asked a question. We look up, look around the room. Hanna lifts her hand to wave, cloth still in it, and Toni slaps it down again. We crowd around the pizza box, hearts beating, loud, hard, because all this time we’ve been hiding, all this time we’ve been avoiding danger, we realise now, what we’ve really been doing is waiting for it. 

The pizza box is a little tilted, leaning against the footstool, but not enough to move the guitar pick on its own. And besides, it isn’t just moving down. It’s moving across. Choosing letters, spelling out a message. C-O-M-E-O-U-T-S-I-D-E. When it drops to the floor we jerk, like we’ve been electrocuted, but it isn’t a burning, painful kind of feeling, like Emma must’ve had when she dropped the wire in the bath last week. This is the fizzing kind, the thrilling kind, the hand-just-a-little-higher-up-your-thigh-kind. 

Hanna is the first one at the window. She keeps the curtains closed but pushes her face against the glass like she might suddenly have developed the ability to see through the black cloth that’s hung there. Jenny is at the front door, her ear pressed. 

‘We don’t know it’s them.’ Sarah’s voice shakes and she coughs to cover it.

 We don’t know. Maybe it is our friends out there, or not even our friends. Girls we only ever passed in hallways. Girls who wore too much foundation so their faces were always orange and their necks always white. Girls with reputations. Girls who kept their heads down and their library books close. Girls with nothing to lose. 

Maybe it’s the others; the ones who’ve been taking them. 

But maybe it’s the girls.

We line up at the door, hands held. Our fingers are stiff and warm, our hearts loud and fast, our bodies unable to tell the difference between fear and excitement. We move as one, but it’s Jenny who opens the door. 

The porch outside provides a buffer but we see the woods immediately. Tall, thick pines, needles ready to itch, tower over low fruit trees, red apples hanging from them like in every fairy tale you ever read. The trees take up the whole eyeline straight ahead, but if we look left or right we see houses just like ours. Solar lights flicker down empty driveways, all the cars long gone. 

We wonder if there are other girls camped out in these other houses, if they just got a message too. Maybe they were turning playing cards, the way we used to back in school, ‘red means yes, black means no’, only those two options. Maybe they were waiting for knocks on a wall, ‘one for yes, two for no, three for get the fuck out.’ Maybe they just lit a candle and held hands in a circle in the dark, asking is there anybody there? Or maybe we’re the only ones left. Because right now, there’s only us outside, crammed up against each other, Scooby-Do style. Only we already know there won’t be a simple cartoon explanation, won’t be a mask we can just pull off. We think all this while we watch, while we wait. We’re not psychic, it isn’t like that. It’s more like, how they say a group of girls living together, their time of the month will sync? We’ve been together so long now, everything syncs. 

We step out. At first, there’s nothing but the breeze, tingling our skin. We press our arms across our chests, trying to hide what the cold does to us, to our bodies. There’s no one here to see anyway. There’s nothing but the houses, the empty driveways, the trees. There are no men in dirty boilersuits, no dancing clowns, no monsters holding chainsaws aloft. Just the breeze, the dark and – the solar lights. We see it at once, our breath catching, our hearts stopping, just for a moment. 

The house next to us. 

The driveway.

The lights don’t end where the driveway ends. They carry on, onto the pavement, across the road, into the woods. We think of aeroplane trips long ago, early morning alcohol on our parents’ breath, the plastic-wrapped safety guide sticky in the pocket seat, the steward motioning, one finger of each hand, showing us the lights that will guide us to safety. And we know two things. 

These lights will not guide us to safety. 

We are going to follow them anyway.  

We line up like this: Jenny, Toni, Sarah, me, Hanna. We loop our limbs through each other, fingers grasping elbows. If we could tie ourselves together, we would. We might trip, fall, but we wouldn’t be alone, we couldn’t be separated. We don’t have any rope though, not since Katie last month. We cut her down, pushed the rope outside the door with her. Maybe we should’ve kept it. We don’t know what happened to her after that, we don’t know what happens to any of them. 

It’s been so long since we’ve had the moon on our skin and being out here awakens something in us. We haven’t been bitten, or at least not in the way you might think. We’re not going to turn into wolves, our fingernails aren’t going to grow and our bodies aren’t going to split open to reveal bloody, matted fur, but there’s a wildness in us. We all feel it. It’s dark out, the kind of night we were told never to walk alone, the moon spilling down us, lighting us up, and yet here we are, not alone, but walking, walking. 

The lights carry on through the woods, shimmering beacons in the dark. We count the spaces, five steps between each one. Low leaves cast shadows along the path. It’s pretty, almost. The dirt and stones under our bare feet scrape and catch, but we take care, move slowly, until we reach a clearing. It wasn’t here before. We know that. From hikes or picnics or late night dates that couldn’t be confined to movie theatre seats that tried to fold under our exploring bodies. The clearing wasn’t here before, but the clearing is here now. The grass is flattened, and more lights circle out at the edges, like a stage, the moon a spotlight, shining down on three masked girls. 

The closest one is streaked with shadows, her body almost in the trees. Her hair sits sharp on her shoulders, like it’s been cut in one perfect slice. Her pleated skirt hangs over her knees and she holds a brown satchel close against her chest, papers spilling from the top. The second girl is right in the centre of the clearing, crouched awkwardly, one knee up under her chin, the other leg stretched out, heavy boot making ridges in the dirt. Her t-shirt is rucked up, some band name scrawled over it that we never listened to and now probably never will. The last girl, she wears cut-off denims and a striped vest, like us. She’s hanging from a tree branch, her torso long and lean, her arms pulling her up over and over. 

The masks are plain and white. No eye holes. Just dents. Rounded cheekbones and pursed lips. We know them. Fifth period art. The first day of term. Another lifetime ago. Mrs Collins gave us one each, told us to make them our own. We could do whatever we wanted, paint, or stick, or carve. We turned them over, considered the possibilities, thought about all that we hoped we would be. She wanted us to express ourselves, that’s what she told us, her tunic flowing behind her, her voice a sing-song. A good day. But these masks are still blank, so we can’t see the girl’s faces, just their bodies. We categorise them easily: the nerd, the rebel, the jock. Simple as that. And we realise we’re no better than the boys, the men, anyone who ever saw us like that. 

Noises from the woods on either side make us look, rustles that could be wind in the trees or could be voices, and we press together, like that will help. 

The girl in the vest laughs, ‘We won’t bite.’ 

But the one crouching snarls like she just might. The athlete springs one last time, up and around the branch, thuds her feet in the dirt with perfect balance. We would clap, if we were able to move. Our bodies are taut, entwined in each other, and it’s only when the three girls approach us that we move at all, a couple of steps backwards, but the lights that brought us here are gone, the path we came from closed over. We jostle into a new position, back to back, protecting ourselves as best we can. The three masked girls stop. The nerd pulls a paper from her bag and runs her finger down it like she’s checking something off. The rebel stands up, her hands slouched in the pockets of her skirt, the zip peeled open at the top to show her pierced belly button. But it’s the athlete who speaks, ‘It’s easier if you choose yourself.’

She stands with her hands on her hips, lean and strong, one knee bent a little forward. Then she swaps to the other leg and we realise she’s stretching. 

Jenny speaks for us, asks what we don’t want to, but have to. ‘Choose what?’

Athlete crosses herself, left hand on right shoulder, right hand swinging. Her body turns as she talks. ‘You’ll be with us eventually anyway. Sooner or later. It’s easier if you choose yourself.’

The other two girls creep a little closer each time we look away, like in that kid’s game, Mr Wolf. Rebel pulls something from her pocket. Small and silver and sharp. She pricks her finger with it, over and over. Her voice is low, throaty, like she’s been smoking for years longer than she could have been alive. ‘You’re here because of our message, right? We don’t always get through. But we try.’ 

Toni this time, ‘That was you? We thought maybe it was … the others.’

Rebel shakes her head. ‘You think they’ll be that good to you? Give you a warning?’ Somewhere in the distance a noise, stuttering, closer, closer. We squeeze our bladders, bite our lips. Rebel twitches, ‘We don’t have long.’ 

Toni steps toward her, and we try to pull her back but it’s no use. Rebel cocks her masked head and then nods. Toni turns back to us. ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. The waiting, it’s worse. The not knowing.’ We get it. We live it, every day. Toni sobs, real from-the-gut noises like she’s been holding back for months. Sarah rushes to her, holds her close. ‘I’m coming with you.’ 

Rebel waits a moment, but we stay where we are. Then she leads them away, past the stump, to the other side of the clearing. The three of them step into the woods. Toni and Sarah don’t look back. The chain threaded tight between us is slipping.

Nerd is right up close to us then. She still has the paper from the bag in one hand, the writing on it clear, typed in neat red font, we are the missing and the missed, over and over. She reaches out a hand, and Hanna takes it. We hold her firm, our feet slipping on pine needles, but Hanna is determined. She shakes us off. ‘Aren’t you tired? Aren’t you tired of all of this?’

 We let go. She goes to the girl. Then to the edge of the clearing. Then to the woods, to the blackness beyond. Three of us now, me and Jenny and Athlete. 

‘Not ready?’

We shake our heads. Athlete moves back to her tree-gym, jumps and grabs the branch so that her feet are a few inches above the floor, swinging. ‘Go then. But be fast. The lights only hold them off for so long.’ We turn, and the lights are back, the path is back. 

We move together. We look forward, only forward. We don’t run, because running means panic, and we won’t. We won’t. We step into the woods, track our way back with the lights, but they’re different, darker. We realise they’re spread out, much further than they were before. We count out loud, ten, fifteen, twenty steps between them. Each time we plunge into the dark we are nearly sick with the fear, our bodies taut as pulled string, our arms shaking with the cold. But we walk and we count and we walk and we count and when we reach the seventh light, we see her. 

~

Billie is upstairs, bored and groaning. We’re trying to fill the time, but we all stay up too late and sleep until the afternoon. We pile clothes and plates and snacks and papers and we bat away flies and we forget to wash. We’ve worn a path into the carpet beneath the highest window in the house, the only one we feel safe enough to look out and we laugh at how we used to be scared of spaces like that, of attics and cellars. Of how we thought we knew what fear was. We crave routine but we can’t bring ourselves to do anything about it. We sleep when it’s light, watch when it’s dark. 

Toni appears, clinging to her binder, all the worksheets they tried to get us to do when it first started because according to our teacher, there wasn’t anything a worksheet couldn’t solve. We needed survival skills, self-defence. They gave us feelings wheels and traffic light charts. 

Billie snatches up one of the sheets as Toni walks past. It’s just an outline, like a gingerbread man, and at the top, it says, HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY? We’re supposed to section it up – shade in one leg purple and write ‘lonely’, shade in an arm yellow and write ‘curious’ – see how it changes from day-to-day, track our moods, like that will do anything to help. Billie picks a pen from the pot on the floor and writes on the head, scared, then on the neck she writes, shit-scared. She holds the pen in between her teeth like she’s thinking it over. I roll over and take the pen from her and write, bored, down one leg. She laughs a little, then snatches the pen back and across the crotch she writes, horny. I nod. I think of Alexander after my birthday, last spring, how we did it just because it was legal. How he didn’t know what he was doing but I let him do it anyway because I thought I was supposed to. I think about the small amount of blood when I went to the toilet, after.

It’s different with Billie. She’s slow, soft. We don’t know if the others know but we don’t care. One time, when we’re just done, still panting into each other’s mouths, she tells me, ‘This is the only time I’m not scared.’ And I feel like I should be angry, that she’s using me, that this isn’t anything real. But the truth is, it’s the only time I’m not scared either. 

We’re all scared, all of us, all of the time. But we don’t board up the windows, or triple lock the doors, like in shows we used to watch, before. They can’t get in. We don’t know why it works that way, they just can’t. But somehow that’s worse. Because it’s all on us then. 

Billie was the first. Not the first to go missing. The first to do the other thing. We cleaned up as best we could, but we weren’t good at it, not back then. We panicked.  Dragged her, nearly opened the door, and then Jenny heard the dragging, grunting noise outside and we slammed it closed again. We left Billie there until the morning. We hid, all together in one upstairs room, crying and whimpering. We cried a little less at the next one. And the next.

~

Billie. We know it is her from the lines in her arms. Her face is masked, blank, but we know her body. I know her body. Jenny tells me to look down at the ground and I do but there’s blood pooling there, so much blood. It coats the path and the sticks and the pebbles and the leaves. It coats our bare feet, splashes up our calves. We wonder if our bladders will hold with the fear or if we should just let them go, let the yellow trickle into the red. 

We keep moving to the next light, and the next, but the dark is so dark, and so far, and each light we pass now we see feet, we see legs, we see pieces of people we recognise and one time a hand reaches out and we see fingernails, blackened by electricity, and we see trailing rope and we hear breath, choked or gurgled, muffled by the white masks but not enough and we hear the thing/s behind us, dragging, breathing, laughing, and it’s dark. So dark. We see the house, in the distance, a million miles away and we see shadows flicker across the path, some fast, some slower, and we wonder if we can make it. 

If we can both make it.

 Jenny turns to me without warning and pushes her mouth on mine, hard and desperate, and it’s not like it was with Billie, but it’s something, and I kiss her back, and the smell, that tooth, how long it must have been open in there, but I reach for it anyway, my tongue seeking it out because that smell means she is living and it is part of her and I’m part of her and I don’t know where my body ends and where hers begins in this dark. This dark. And my heart is beating fast when she’s pulled away and I don’t see what has her but I hear it, thick and ropey, a noise from the body, not from the throat, not from anything I’ve ever heard before, and I see gloved hands around her waist and I see her legs, limp and as she is dragged away from the path and into the woods, I hear her, I hear them all and they are saying 

run,

run,

run,

and so I do. I run toward the last light though it’s so, so far, and when I get there I see the bare feet again and I know there’s a girl there, in a mask and I know she was my friend, my family, or maybe my lover and I know I need to look at her but the house is there, right there and there’s something close in the woods, shuffling and breathing. I look at the house. The path is clear. I can get home. I can. But to what? To who? I look at the girl and I lift the mask. The smell is stronger than ever and I force her lips open, and they’re still warm, just. I push my fingers into her mouth and I feel the hole in her tooth and I wonder how they got her here so fast and then I hear the footsteps close behind me and I wonder why I don’t get to survive this, I wonder why I don’t get to be the final girl, I wonder is it something I did or something I said or someone I kissed, and I feel the arms pulling me into the trees and then I don’t wonder anything anymore. 

*

Gaynor Jones is the recipient of a 2020 Northern Writer’s Award from New Writing North for her short story collection, Girls Who Get Taken. She loves stories that feature wayward teens, middle-aged women who’ve had enough, and the darker sides of suburban life. Visit her at jonzeywriter.com and on Twitter and Instagram @JonzeyWriter.