Page 100 of Breaking the Dark

“Really,” she responds, disingenuously. “How fascinating. I’m surprised that didn’t put you off.”

“Ha! Well, I only found out about it after I’d paid nearly three million quid for the place.”

She swings her phone light around the space. It’s completely empty. But it feels full. She crouches and lays her hand against the dirt floor. She is sure she can feel it pulsing, rising and falling, like a slumbering child.

“There are no spiders down here, by the way,” she calls up. “Not even any cobwebs.”

“I don’t believe you,” he replies playfully.

“I swear!”

She takes one last look around the space, runs her hands down some piping, feels it glow beneath her hand, then ascends back to the kitchen, where Sebastian is waiting for her.

“Did you feel it?” he says.

“Feel what?”

“The ghosts. The curse?”

She beams at him, showing him her perfect white teeth. “No!” She laughs. “I didn’t feel a thing!”

THIRTY-NINE

JESSICA WALKS TO the window in her office and stares out for a moment across the street. The day is beginning to grow dark; the streetlights will come on soon, it’s dry and still, a perfect night for teenagers to leave their cozy homes and cross town. Jessica can feel the dark energy building. The wrongness and the badness, the incipient chaos. But she can’t figure out how to stop it. She scoots to her desk and opens her laptop and looks for updated news from the UK.

WHERE ARE OUR GIRLS? screams a headline from a paper called the Sun. Beneath are pictures of Amina and Audrey, who are still missing despite extensive searches of the Phipps property and grounds.

There are still no photos of “Debra Phipps” accompanying any of the news reports, but on Twitter, a woman named Clarissa Stowe claims to have sold Debra all six of her Belgian Malinois over the preceding eight years and described Debra Phipps as an unassuming elderly woman with no interest in anything other than dogs. “She hated people, liked living alone, I cannot imagine in a million years why an elderly misanthropist would suddenly want to, or be able to, kidnap three fifteen-year-old girls.”

Jessica feels answers swirling chaotically though her head, they’re up there, but she cannot grab hold of them. But after a time, her thoughts are disturbed by the buzz of her phone and she glances down at it to see that her home screen image has gone, and the screen is now entirely black apart from a moving line of words scrolling across the screen in white text.

Hi, this is Miranda….

Thank you so much for downloading my app….

I’m on my way!

She rejoins Luke, who is standing in front of her corkboard trying to find a connection between the cellar at the Upside Down bar and the cellar at Sebastian’s house that might help them work out where Fox has taken Malcolm. She unpins the flyer she took from Lark’s bedroom and shows it to Luke.

“Look at that,” she says, pointing at the QR code.

“What?”

“Don’t you think that’s a strange-looking code?”

Luke peers at it more closely. “I guess?”

“You know, when I scanned it earlier it made my phone burn hot in my hand.”

Luke grimaces. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. And now apparently there is an app on my phone, but I can’t find it anywhere. And those girls outside your place earlier, talking about a laser, in your phone?”

Luke stares down at her phone and then back up at her. “Know any geeks?”

“Well, yuh. Malcolm.” She sighs. “Shit.”

She picks up her phone and she calls Amber.