Once

Twenty

Letty Gardener was supposed to be revising. It was the very reason her parents had banished her up to her bedroom. She had her English Lit exam in a few days and she was not exactly the country's leading expert on To Kill a Mockingbird.

But Letty Gardener was not revising. She was instead working on a little side project of hers: the Art of the Perfect Selfie.

Laid back on her bed, head reclining against the window sill, she held her phone above her and made about a hundred tiny little movements of her face, nudging her chin this way and that, trying her eyes slightly more open and slightly more closed. She tried a whole range of emotions: mysterious, smouldering, kookily surprised. Somehow none of them were quite perfect.

Maybe it was the room that was the problem, which was weird, since usually her bedroom was great as a backdrop to her Instagram sessions. Built into a sort of square tower poking out above the top corner of her parents' three-storey villa on Grove Street, it had a huge, wide window taking up most of the wall behind the bed. Great light, plenty of decent angles. There was no reason why it shouldn't be working tonight.

Something to do with the light this evening, maybe. The hot summer day was fading fast into another dusky evening, the whole room infused with a burning orange glow and a warm breeze wafting in through the open window. Pretty enough, but awful for pictures. Letty scowled to herself and tried adjusting the brightness on her phone.

She took another picture, then brought it to her face, studying it. Almost there now. A few minor improvements to be made. She carefully adjusted the candle on the windowsill to a better angle, moved a book from her bedside table and pressed it open and face-down on the pillow beside her. A bit of set-dressing to make people think she'd been casually reading before bed.

As a final touch she pulled out her glossy mane of caramel-blonde hair and let it cascade over the windowsill, dangling down out of the open window. She lifted the phone again and smiled, pleased with the result. Her hair was like a golden halo splaying out all around her head, practically glowing in the evening sun.

Finally satisfied, she lifted the phone and took the picture.

She lowered the phone to examine her handiwork, but immediately her face clouded. She was so distracted she didn't hear the faint rustle outside her window - a sound of tattered robes fluttering in the evening air. She didn't hear the rattling catch of rancid breath just a few feet from her head. Even if she had heard it she'd have just thought it was the rustle of the breeze through the leaves of a tree - it was a sheer three-storey drop to the ground outside that window. There couldn't be anything out there.

The thing that was distracting her was something weird about the picture. There was a sort of hazy shape, like a grey smudge, just outside the window. It looked like a pale wisp of smoke.

But the more she looked at it, the more it seemed to take a definite sort of shape.

It looked like... like a hand?

At that exact moment the gnarled grey fingers wrapped themselves around her glossy golden hair, and pulled.

Her parents, three floors down, didn't hear her scream.

*

Elle opened her eyes. Another dream. But just like last night, she knew it wasn't a dream. What she'd seen was too intense and too horrible to have come from her own head.

She sat up in bed, cold and clammy. Her hair was sticking to her forehead with cold sweat and she forced it up and over her head.

Her hand fumbled over the bedside table. The room was dark, with just the faintest wisps of orange light left in the evening air outside. Her shaking fingers eventually found her phone and brought it to her face.

Letty Gardener - god, what was that thing outside her window? She'd just seen the faintest movement of those grey robes, heard that ancient hoarse breath. And that hand. That horrible twisted hand, thin and bony as a rotting skeleton, fingernails long and ragged at the points, paper grey skin pulled taut over razor-sharp bones.

A terrifying hand. A hand of something grim and sinister - the hand of a witch, of a monster.

She shuddered, then frantically unlocked her phone.

Another deluge of unread messages were waiting for her. Jax, Russell, Maggie, even Sellan. She couldn't remember ever getting a message from Sellan before, aside from the occasional meme he posted in the group Whatsapp.

She didn't bother even opening any of them. She knew what they'd be saying. They'd all be variations on the theme of Message me if you need anything.

Well, that's exactly what she was going to do.

She opened the group Whatsapp and sent a single message:

The next one will be Letty Gardener.

Then, suddenly exhausted, she fell back into her pillows and almost immediately she was asleep again.