The Retreat by Sarah Pearse
For my mum
“You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the Grim Reaper.”
—Convicted murderer Robert Alton Harris’s last words
SUMMER 2003
Prologue
Thea’s scream rips through the clearing, startling the birds from the trees in a flurry of flapping wings.
The sound isn’t human; it’s high-pitched and desperate, the kind of scream that turns your stomach inside out, makes your ears burn.
She should have waited until they got back to camp. He told her to wait.
But Thea had insisted. Half an hour and three beers since they’d snuck away from camp for some time alone, and she couldn’t hold it any longer: “Don’t look at me like that, it’s your fault for bringing so many cans. Shout if you see someone coming . . .”
Laughing, she’d walked a few feet away, carefully positioned herself so Ollie could see only the sandy tips of her white Keds, the thin trail of wet already winding through the dusty floor.
The scream intensifies.
Ollie freezes for a moment, but instinct kicks in: he lurches into action, pivoting toward her. But almost instantly, he comes to a halt, a cloud of dried soil and leaves kicking into the air.
A movement: someone stepping out from the tangle of branches.
The rock on the cliff above, the island’s namesake, is casting them in shadow, but Ollie can see right away that this person isn’t from camp. They aren’t in shorts and a T-shirt like the kids, or the cheery green of the camp leaders; they’re wearing something dark and shapeless.
Ollie’s eyes dart to Thea. He can now see her frantically thrashing in the dense underbrush.
He wants to move, to do something, but his body is locked. All he can do is stare, his heart lunging in his chest—hard, knocking thuds against his ribs.
A violent flurry of movement, and then a sound: the sharp liquid crack of something bursting and breaking.
It’s a sound he’s never heard before.
Ollie closes his eyes. He knows it’s Thea, but in his head, he’s turned her into something else. A puppet. A mannequin.
Anything but her.
His eyes flicker open and it’s then he sees it: the watery trail has become something darker, thicker.
Blood.
It splinters into a fork—the liquid tip of a snake’s tongue.
Another strike: this time harder, faster, but it barely registers, and neither does Thea’s second scream—blistered, cut off, like it’s clotted in her throat—because Ollie’s already running.
He darts into the woods, making for the cove he and Thea found yesterday while the others were building the fire. While they’d both pretended they had stopped there just to talk, to drink, it was obvious it was going to become something more.
His hand on the soft band of skin above her shorts, her mouth pressed against his . . .
The thought is too much; he speeds up. It’s as though he’s running blind—the setting sun flicker-flashing through the trees overhead, his eyes seeing nothing but a blur of shadowy green and the gray-brown carpet of leaves. His sneakers are slipping out from under him, the dry ground as slippery as mud.
Barbed branches pull at his shirt. One catches his arm, snags the soft skin on the inside of his wrist. Blood flares—a ragged line of tiny red beads bursting through his skin.
It feels like he’s done this before—a weird déjà vu, as if in a dream, one of those panicky ones where you wake up sweating and panting, the type that sticks with you for a while afterward.
A few yards on and the trees start to thin, the woodland floor giving way to sand, the rock beneath, flattened elephant-folds of dusty limestone. He’s reached the steps Thea found yesterday, nothing more than wooden treads knocked into the soil. Momentum tugs his body forward with each step and he’s forced to lean back to stop himself from falling.
When he reaches the bottom, he jumps onto the sand and runs toward the small overhang he and Thea had lain in last night, contraband bottles in their hands.
Ollie drops to all fours, hollowing his back to crawl under. Once he’s inside, he sits with his knees drawn up to his chin and concentrates on breathing. In and out. In and out. Being still. Staying quiet.
But his body won’t cooperate; he’s shaking with jerky spasms that he can’t control.
Ollie clamps his hands over his head as if the pressure will force away the scream still ringing in his ears. But now it’s not just the sound, it’s the sight: Thea’s body folding, collapsing—like a puppet master had violently jerked at her strings.