Page 244 of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

Pip staggered back and wiped her mouth. The room reeled again and Becca was in front of her, her shaking hands outstretched.

‘No,’ Pip tried to scream but her voice got lost somewhere inside. She hurtled back and side-stepped around the island. Her fingers bit into one of the stools to keep her on her feet. She grabbed it and launched it behind her. There was a head-split echo of clattering as it took out Becca’s legs.

Pip ran into the wall in the hallway. Ears ringing and shoulder throbbing, she leaned into it so it wouldn’t morph away from her and scaled her way to the front door. It wouldn’t open but then she blinked and it vanished and she was outside somehow.

It was dark and spinning and there was something in the sky. Bright and colourful mushrooms and doomclouds and sprinkles. The fireworks with a ripping-the-earth sound from the common. Pip picked up her feet and ran towards the bright colours, into the woods.

The trees were walking in a wooden two-step and Pip’s feet went numb. Missing. Another sparkling sky-roar and it made her blind.

Her hands out in front to be her eyes. Another crack and Becca was in her face.

She pushed and Pip fell on her back in the leaves and mud. And Becca was standing over her, hands splayed and reaching down and . . . a rush of energy came back to her. She forced it down her leg and kicked out hard. And Becca was on the ground too, lost in the dark leaves.

‘I was tr-trying to h-help you,’ Pip stammered.

She turned and crawled and her arms wanted to be legs and her legs, arms. She scrabbled up to her missing feet and ran from Becca. Towards the churchyard.

More bombs were bursting and it was the end of the world behind her. She grasped at the trees to help push her on as they danced and twirled at the falling sky. She grabbed a tree and it felt like skin.

It lunged out and gripped her with two hands. They fell on the ground and they rolled. Pip’s head smashed into a tree, a snaking trail of wet down her face, the iron-bite of blood in her mouth. The world went dark again as the redness pooled by her eyes. And then Becca was sitting on her and there was something cold round Pip’s neck. She reached up to feel and it was fingers but her own wouldn’t work. She couldn’t prise them off.

‘Please.’ The word squeezed out of her and the air wouldn’t come back.

Her arms were stuck in the leaves and they wouldn’t listen to her. They wouldn’t move.

She looked up into Becca’s eyes.She knows where to put you where they’ll never find you. In a dark as dark place, with the bones of Andie Bell.

Her arms and legs were gone and she was following.

‘I wish someone like you had been there for me,’ Becca cried. ‘All I had was Andie. She was my only escape from my dad. She was my only hope after Max. And she didn’t care. Maybe she never had. Now I’m stuck in this thing and there’s no way out except this. I don’t want to do this. I’m sorry.’

Pip couldn’t remember now what it felt like to breathe.

Her eyes were splitting and there was fire in the cracks.

Little Kilton was being swallowed by an even bigger dark. But those rainbow sparks in the night were nice to look at. One last nice thing to send you on before it all goes black.

And as it did, she felt the cold fingers loosen and come away.

The first breath ripped and snagged as she sucked it down. The blackness pulled back and sounds grew out of the earth.

‘I can’t do it,’ Becca said, moving her hands back to hug herself. ‘I can’t.’

Then a crash of rustling footsteps and a shadow leaped over them and Becca was dragged off. More sounds. Shouting and screaming and, ‘You’re OK, pickle.’

Pip turned her head and her dad was here with her, pinning Becca down on the ground while she struggled and cried.

And there was another person behind her, sitting her up, but she was a river and couldn’t be held.

‘Breathe, Sarge,’ Ravi said, stroking her hair. ‘We’re here. We’re here now.’

‘Ravi, what’s wrong with her?’

‘Hypnol,’ Pip whispered, looking up at him. ‘Rohypnol in . . . tea.’

‘Ravi, call an ambulance now. Call the police.’

The sounds went away again. It was just the colours and Ravi’s voice vibrating in his chest and through her back to the outer edge of all sense.