Jelly Cooper: Alien (5 page)

I lean closer to the m
irror and peer at my reflection and my heart stops beating.   

Molly’s right:
there are flames flickering in the depths of my green eyes. 

My restarting heart slams against my chest and starts to race.

Just to clarify, I say again: there’s a wild, mad, fire. Burning.  In my eyes!  A wild mad fire that other people can see.

This isn’t
Watership Down.  This is sunny old Seabrook, where the weekly high-point consists of the local Post Office getting its regular consignment of Walnut Whips.  I am
finished.

Groping
for anything nailed down, I plonk on the edge of the bathtub. Deep breaths.  Get a grip.  Humphrey’s waiting for me.  Deep breaths.  Humphrey’ll know what to do for sure. 

I splash water on my face, try to drag a brush through the tangled mess
of my hair,
will
my eyes to behave and go to face what I hope is going to be light at the end of a very long and very
weird
tunnel.

“Hi Jay.”

Except that Humphrey’s not alone.  Agatha has joined him on the bed.  My step falters.

“Um...hi, Agatha.”

Agatha smiles, her thick-framed specs wobbling.  Startling violent eyes gaze at me from behind the lenses.

Why am I so damned uncomfortable? 
When you find yourself in a desperate situation –
eyes that are on fire.  I’d call that desperate -
you turn to your friends.  You share your troubles.  You invite them into your confidence.  Or, if your name is Jelly Cooper and you’re socially incompetent, you push it all to the back of your mind and turn to your other close friend: denial.

Given the choice between telling Humphrey and Agatha that there’s something very, very wrong with me and telling them about some stupid dreams…

Stupid dreams it is then.

“
So what happened this afternoon?  Where did you go?” Agatha asks, eyes twinkling. 

Agatha, whilst no doormat, is constantly amazed at my sheer lack of self-restraint.
  There’s that and the fact that she’s a brilliant student who secretly adores school and can’t understand why I don’t feel the same.  Seriously, she gets cravings for homework about two weeks into the summer holidays!  Can you imagine? 

Not that I hold it ag
ainst her; we’re all different and this I fully accept.  Plus, I love the way Agatha tries to hide her enthusiasm from me because she’s, um, how shall I say, sensitive to my feeling of intense mistrust towards the whole educational establishment.

But I’m stalling and they know it.

“I came home.  That thing with Jason Stevens freaked me out.”

Agatha frowns.  She’s sharp as a tack and you really have to watch what you say around her.  Something I seem to have forgotten.

“What do you mean ‘that thing with Jason Stevens’?  He fell over a bag, didn’t he?” 

She glances at Humphrey, who nods and mumbles, “
that’s what I heard.”

Backed into a corner,
I do what I swore a long time ago not to do: I lie.

“
Erm, yeah.  But I was really close and I saw him go down and it, erm, made me feel sick?”

Humphrey
sighs in typical Humphrey style.  “Liar.  What’s wrong?”

S
cary-astute friends.  I have two scary-astute friends.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry
and I certainly don’t know how much of my fractured sanity I should reveal. I’m not ready for the straightjacket just yet. 

“
OK, it was nothing to do with Jason Stevens.  I’m having a reoccurring nightmare.  A really, really, nasty reoccurring nightmare, over and over again and it’s driving me nuts.”

“Are you sure
it’s the same dream?” Agatha asks, sees the look on my face and retracts.  “Of course you’re sure.”  She frowns at me and I just know that she’s paying close attention to my pale skin and tired eyes.  “How often?”

See what I mean?

“Every night.  At first it was every now and again but recently, every bloody night.”

Humphrey sl
owly raises his eyebrows.  My intention is to smile.  It doesn’t quite make it. 

Agatha jumps off the bed and forces me to sit down in her place. 
“You should tell us everything.”

I do as she says.  Agatha’s smart.  It pays to listen to her.

***
              ***              ***

“He drops me.  He drops me head first into the canyon.  I die, then I wake up.”

I don’t tell them about the early dreams, the ones about a man in a yellow raincoat.  What’s the point?  That guy is like
Santa compared to my latest nightly visitor.

“That’s it?”
Asks Agatha with wide eyes.  “That’s the whole dream?”

“
YES THAT’S THE WHOLE DREAM!”

She
flinches and some part of me regrets shouting at her.  But I really am teetering on the edge of crazy and crazy comes complete with erratic behaviour.  Agatha, though, won’t let it go. 

“Is that the whole dream
or have you left anything out?”

My gaze flits around the room from object to object, landing on anything except a pair of violet eyes that have a habit of reading too much into things.  You see, h
ere comes the really wiggy part; the part that scared the living daylights out of me just when I thought I couldn’t be any more scared than I already was.

“He,
erm…drops me.  I wake up.”

“So you said.”

Sometimes, Humphrey comes
this close
(holding thumb and forefinger millimeters apart), I swear.

“Yes, thank you Humphrey,”
I mutter.  “Oh well, you’ve heard the rest of it, you may as well hear the freaky bit into the bargain.”

Ignore the fire, ignore the fire.

“Like that wasn’t freaky enough.”

“Humphrey, I’m warning you…”

“Sorry.”

I puff out my cheeks and take a minute to gather my thoughts. 
Here goes…

“I’m lying in bed, not
quite sure if I’m alive or dead, wondering what just happened to me.  Just when wake up properly and realise that I’ve had a dream about
him
, the Hunter, I hear his voice.  Inside my head.”

Blank faces
.

“While I’m
awake
,” I stress.  “He says, ‘I’m coming for you Camille.  I’m closer every day.’  It’s a freaking
nightmare
!”

I throw my hands in the air.

Agatha taps her bottom lip for a while as she steals sneaky glances at my face.  It’s annoying, but I let her carry on.  She’s obviously cooking something up in that enormous brain of hers.

She
stops tapping and says, 

“
We may need to go through this whole thing again.  At first I thought that Rhiannon was finally getting to you and you were going a bit loopy because of it”.

“HAH!”
 

I know that I shouldn’t interrupt, but come on!  We’re talking about me having a seriously deranged reoccurring nightmare
and surreal panic attacks as a result of some teasing by a pompom-waver with the IQ of a wicker basket!  I think not.

Agatha waves her hand
.  “Yeah, yeah.  I know.  Anyway, I don’t think Rhiannon has anything to do with your dream.  It doesn’t feel right.”

Humphrey’s head
comes up at this point.  “Sounds right to me.”

“Well,”
Agatha twiddles the ends of her hair.  “The maniac in Jelly’s dream wants to kill her – like
really
wants to kill her.  Rhiannon and the mini-me-minions are usually just talk, they hardly ever do hands on.  The threat of a couple of girls, and I use the term loosely, saying nasty things and waving their fingers about doesn’t add up to what Jelly experiences in her nightmare.  Right?” 

She looks at me
and I nod, once.

“It’s weird,”
I say after a while.  “It all feels so familiar to me.  Him especially.  I get
déjà vu
every time I think of him.”

Agatha pounces on this.
  “What does he look like?  Describe him.  Maybe he’s someone you’ve met and clashed with or something.”

I shake my head.
  “That’s the other strange thing.  When I wake up, I can’t remember what he looks like, although in the dream, I’m sure that I know him.  When I wake, all I can remember is a presence, like an evil force, or a black shadow.”  I frown, once again hating my inability to remember.

Agatha chews the end of her plait and Humphrey gently tugs at her hand to stop her.  She grins at him and I roll my eyes as they share a secret smile.  When will they get their act together and actually
get
together?

“Guys
, I am still here you know.”

At least they have the good grace to look uncomfortable. 

“Why did you call him that, by the way?” Humphrey asks.

“Huh?”

“You just called him the Hunter.  You said it like we’d know what it meant.”

I open my mouth to explain.

Oh shit.

“Because that’s what he is,” I croak.  “He’s some kind of hunter and I’m the thing he’s hunting.”

I know it’s true.  I say the words and feel it.  Oh God, there’s a very evil thing out there and it’s after me.  Oh God.

“Um, Jay, that’s kind of insane,” Humphrey says.

“DON’T USE THAT WORD!” I shout, scaring us all.  I take a breath and push it out.  “I know how it sounds, but don’t say that, Humph.  I’m not mad.  I don’t want to be mad.  OK?”

Humphrey rubs his hands on the knees of his jeans.

“OK, OK.  Sorry.”

He touches the back of my hand with his little finger.  “You’re not mad.  Well, you are a bit mad, but not, like cuckoo mad, you know?”

I glare at him and he covers his ears with his hands. 

“I know, I know, don’t make me flick your ears.”

“What about telling your parents?”  Agatha asks quietly.

I stare at her
.  “Are you out of your mind?  Nuh-uh, no way and neither of you will breathe a word, understand?  I am not involving them in this.  They would have a fit if I told them that I was having a reoccurring nightmare about other worlds and some strange nutcase, I mean bad person, chasing me half way across the galaxy to kill me.  They’d probably think I was…um…having a breakdown and, and they’d be WRONG and then there’d be tears and worrying and…and…tears. They don’t need to know anything about it.  So in answer to your question, ‘yes’ I have considered telling my parents, and ‘no’ that’s not going to happen.”

I pause for a much-needed breath.  Agatha and Humphrey
stare at me as if I’ve grown another head.

“Jelly?”
  Humphrey’s spooked.  I can see it in his eyes.

Hope they can’t see the fire in mine.

“What?” I snap.  My self-control is up and down like the line on a heart monitor and there doesn’t seem to be much that I can do about it.

“Do you want to explain what just happened?”

“Not particularly, no.” 

I know that my face has taken on
an unflattering mulish look, but again, I can’t seem to help it.  OK, so my reaction may have been a teeny tiny bit over the top.  Doesn’t mean that I have to explain myself to anyone, does it?

Does it?

“I can’t tell my parents.”

“Why not?”
Humphrey asks.

I groan out loud.  “Th
is really does make me sound crazy.  Oh, alright!  I can’t tell my parents because…um, it would…um, put them in danger.  See, makes me sound like I’ve looped the loop, doesn’t it?”

Finally Agatha says something.

“That’s a little bit worrying, Jay.”

Not quite what I was hoping for. 

“You’re trying to shield your parents from him.  Not shield them from worrying about your sleepless nights and bad dreams, but from him physically.  That means that you think that the thing in your dreams…”

“- the Hunter”

“The
Hunter
in your dreams is an actual threat and real.”

Humphrey grunts.  I ig
nore him and focus on Agatha, the helpful friend.

“Every ni
ght when I wake from the dream,” I admit, “I would swear that he’s real.”

Humph looks up at me.  Shaking his head, he solemnly declares, “not good, Jay.  Not good
.”

“Yeah
, thanks Humphrey.  I did manage to figure that much out all by myself.”