A beat passed before I spoke.
‘You mean you thought her ghost was still around?’
‘Her spirit. She loved the Hollows so much that, before she went, she told us she was never going to leave. And she didn’t. Or so I believed at the time. I mean, I never saw her, but I felt her. I really thought she was still here. And that made this place even more sacred. It was Abigail’s home. Her eternal home.’
‘So you believe in all that stuff?’
She stubbed out her cigarette and put the butt in the box. ‘I did. That’s what’s important. We did. And animism isn’t some kooky belief, Tom. Most religions and belief systems around the world are based around this idea of nature spirits. Go to Japan, South East Asia, Africa . . . Look at Buddhism or Shinto or Hinduism. It’s actually rarer for human beings to believe in just one God. And we were all about rejecting what society wanted us to believe. It was much more interesting to believe in this stuff. For me, it was fun, kind of cool.’
‘I get that,’ I said. I was wrapped up in the story but still aware that I needed her to hurry up so I could get back to Frankie. I motioned for Nikki to continue.
‘So yeah, we believed Abigail’s spirit was still here, in the Hollows. And we became obsessed with trying to protect it for her, because it was outrageous what was going on. The woods were full of garbage. People would party out here and just trash the place. There was a lot of hunting going on – in season, out of season. Pretty much a bloodbath. People dumped all sorts of crap in the woods. And to us, the biggest culprit was the campground and the people who stayed there. Whenever we ran into someone from the campground, dropping trash or whatever, we would tell them off, not that it did any good.’
I sat up straighter. A passage from Jake Robineaux’s book had come back to me. Something about Jake and Mary-Ellen sneaking off for a cigarette and being confronted by some local kids.
‘That was you?’ I asked. ‘In Jake’s book?’
‘Huh. Yeah.’
Something niggled. ‘Hold on, I’m sure Jake wrote that he was told off by a girl and two boys. Who was the other one? Everett?’ Everett Miller had only been a few years older than Nikki and Greg at the time. Surely it had to be him.
‘Let me finish,’ Nikki said. ‘We tried to start a local campaign, to get the other kids at school and their parents interested in making the Hollows a protected area, but nobody wanted to know. The campground brought in a decent amount of money, and money always wins, right? Look at this place. Hollow Falls.’
She said it with contempt.
‘No one cared. And that’s when we decided to take things into our own hands.’
Now I understood. ‘All the pranks, the weird goings-on at the campground. That was you?’
There was, I was surprised to see, a hint of pride in her eyes. Defiance, perhaps. ‘We thought we could scare them off. Make them think the place was haunted. We’d sneak on to the campground and pull up tent pegs, move stuff around, or creep around at night so the kids would see shadows moving past their tents. We wanted to really scare the crap out of them.’
I shook my head.
‘What? We never caused any real damage.’
‘You took stuff, though. Peed in people’s sleeping bags.’
She winced. ‘That wasn’t me. And it was towards the end, when we were getting desperate, starting to realise it wasn’t working. That no matter what we did, the campers weren’t going away.’
She lit another cigarette. She had finished her wine. I would have offered to get her another but I didn’t want her to stop talking.
‘And what happened when you realised that?’ I asked.
She didn’t answer straight away. She tapped ash on to the grass, flinching as she did so, as if she felt guilty about soiling the ground. This hallowed ground.
‘That’s where it all went wrong.’
Chapter 33
Frankie stared at the figure on the floor of the cabin. Ryan, oh Ryan. Was this all her fault? She should have insisted earlier that her dad bring him over to their cabin. Or maybe he was already dead at that point.
Maybe if they’d been together, they’d both be dead.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, her breath fogging the glass. ‘I’m so—’
The figure on the floor moved.
Frankie let out a scream. And the figure on the floor sat up and turned towards her, then stood, went to the wall and switched on the light.
She banged on the glass. ‘Ryan. Let me in.’