Once

Eighteen

For the rest of the day Elle didn't know what to do with herself. She couldn't hang about in town. She looked an absolute mess, for one thing, her face all blotchy and red from crying, plus there was every chance she'd run into her friends again. She couldn't bear to see them. That pitying look in their eyes, that sympathetic tilt of their heads, the unspoken niggling doubt that if she wasn't out of her mind then she must be making it all up. She'd rather never see them for the rest of her life than see those looks again.

And she couldn't go home, either. Sitting up in her room, hearing the twins shrieking with glee in the garden - that would be enough to drive her out of her mind. Plus she was in such a mood that one wrong look from Kaye, one stupid comment or little insensitive murmur, and she might actually throw a punch at her.

So instead of heading home, or even heading anywhere in particular, Elle found herself walking into the woods. There were a few nature trails that ran off through the Farway woods but Elle didn't take any of them. She surged straight off the path the moment she reached the first trees, striking a wobbly diagonal line away through the wood. She didn't feel like running into any cheery families or lovesick young couples out for an afternoon walk in the woods.

What she needed was time to think. To try and unpick all this. To somehow work out what the hell was happening to her.

After walking for what felt like an hour, feet skittering over uneven mossy ground and slipping occasionally on muddy banks and slimy rocks, she came to a point where the trees widened out suddenly. A wide brook cut a clearing through the woods, bubbling over its path of pebbles, skirting away between the trees to the right where it would eventually join the River Far on the north side of town. The river and the woods formed a sort of ring all around Farway, one curling up and around to the left, the other round to the right - two mighty arms forming a natural circle, the whole town clasped between them like a precious jewel.

It was strange. Elle had walked for an hour through the woods in almost perfect silence, the only noise the crunch of bracken underfoot and the rustle of leaves overhead. But here, where the air was full of the babbling noise of the brook gurgling past, it felt more quiet than it had anywhere else in the woods. Perhaps the brook blocked out all the other extraneous background noises, all the little sounds you wouldn't even notice; a sort of natural white noise machine. Or perhaps it was that a sort of natural hush always seemed to fall around moving water - the same quiet hum you feel if you sit on a deserted beach and listen to the tide gently washing in. Water was cleansing, it was pure. Humans had always been fascinated with it the same way they were fascinated with fire: because they couldn't control it, and they couldn't explain it. Part of its inherent magic was that you couldn't help but stare at it with a quiet sort of awe.

About twenty yards up the bank there was a large shelf of rock sticking out slightly over the water. Elle walked over and sat herself on it, edging herself along until her feet dangled over the water that bounded past below.

She closed her eyes. The woods and the water all around her felt huge and empty: a place where, in this tiny little town, she finally felt lost and alone with her thoughts. She took a deep breath. It felt like the first real breath she'd taken in days.

It was easy, sitting here, to forget her problems. To pretend the last twenty four hours had never happened. To imagine that she could just sit here forever, listening to the water, breathing the fresh forest air.

After a long time she slowly opened her eyes. A sigh fluttered out of her; a slightly disappointed one. Disappointed because she couldn't just sit here forever, of course. At some point she would need to go back. At some point her problems, inevitably, were going to catch up with her.

She tried valiantly to put her friends and her family out of her mind for a minute. They were side problems, to be dealt with in their own time. The key was to work out what exactly was happening to her. And how she was ever going to make anyone believe it.

She couldn't stop thinking about that little girl. How scared she'd been, all alone in that dark house. It had been a dream, yes - but at the same time it hadn't. She hadn't been lying when she told her friends earlier that it didn't feel like a dream at all. It felt like she had really been there, in that house, staring up at that monstrous creature.

But, considering such a thing was even physically possible, supposing for one second that it was possible for her to be both asleep at her desk in her own bedroom and seeing a little girl sneaking into a house on the opposite side of town, why would she be the one to be seeing it? What possible connection was there between Elle and this little girl?

And what did any of this have to do with Mr Luzlic and his talk on fairy tales?

Fairy tales. The words stirred something strange in Elle's mind. As if she were half remembering something, or noticing something unusual without knowing what it was. Like walking into a room you've been in before and noticing, somehow, that it's different. Something like deja vu.

The only thing she knew for certain was that the last thing she'd said to her friends was the truest part of it all. It wasn't over. The little girl being attacked in the house on Meadow Lane just felt like the beginning of whatever all this was.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She'd felt it buzzing away in there for the past hour, never once bothering to look at it as she ploughed resolutely onward through the woods. She fished it out now and glanced at the home screen. Seventeen texts, twenty two Whatsapp messages. The most recent was a message from Russell - not in the group chat, a private message just to her.

We just want to help you Elle.

"Then believe me," she said aloud.