Havermouth's Secret Keeper

Chapter Three

Friday

Aislen browsed the aisles for something sweet. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten candy. She wasn’t generally a sweet tooth, but drifting along the confectionary aisle under the flicker of the fluorescent lighting was nostalgically and innocently enjoyable.

She could smell popcorn and hear the voices of other teenagers around her, including the dickheads by the door, who were quizzing every girl that entered if she was a virgin.

“Leave off Toby,” one of the guys said. “That one looked like she was barely legal.”

“Barely legal is still legal.”

Aislen tuned them out as she selected a cherry-flavored lolly pop. It reminded her of Heath’s taunt. “We bet you’re cherry flavored.” Well, she would be now, she decided.

As she pulled the lollypop from the stand, a glint on the ground caught her eye, and she frowned. Water was pouring in from somewhere, slowly flooding over the linoleum of the store. Either the floor was filthy, or the water wasn’t from a tap as it was murky and brown-tinged.

She backed away, hoping it wasn’t toilet water, and not wanting to get it on her if it was, and bumped into someone behind her.

“Careful there,” he said catching at her shoulders as she turned. It was the dickhead from the door, but he was no longer in the t-shirt and jeans he had been wearing. Now he was in a black uniform, complete with a weapon holster.

“What have we got here?” He crowed. “It’s Liam’s crush, from the queue. I bet you look hot in handcuffs.”

***

She woke face down on the pillow, her hair draped over her eyes and almost suffocating her. With a moan, she rolled over and looked up at the pocked ceiling of the motel she’d crashed in overnight to break the trip to Havermouth. Outside, she could hear the distant roars of cars on the freeway, the sound as constant as waves on the shore, but far less soothing. She really didn’t want to spend another day in the car.

But nor did she want to stay in the dingy hotel room - she’d probably end up with fleas. With that in mind, she scrubbed very thoroughly in the shower, before packing up and dropping the room key into the deposit box.

She went through a drive-thru for coffee and a muffin before cranking the music and singing along as she finished the last leg of the journey, the mountain ranges slowly becoming visible on the horizon. Legend had it that the first settlers had called it the Dragon Land as the mountain range from the ocean had looked like a dragon sleeping. Humans had done what humans did best, however, and they’d blasted away bits of the mountains to make way for roads and real estate.

Zeus Forest Works owned the rights to the forest that grew thick on the sides of the mountains to either side on any land that was not being farmed, and their massive lorries piled high with logs of felled trees and emblazoned with the Zeus insignia began to be Aislen’s frequent company on the journey.

She passed through Rideten and told herself that she didn’t feel guilty for not stopping in to see Stella. She knew that if she did, Stella would send someone to Havermouth with Aislen, to help and give her moral support, and it was something that Aislen didn’t want company for. It was something she felt that she had to do alone.

Several decades before, in a massive feat of engineering, and considerable cost, Zeus had gotten permission to blast a tunnel through the mountains between Rideten and the river. Aislen understood why they’d done it – it shaved several hours off the journey – but she wondered if it had paid off for Zeus’ owners. The tunnel always made her nervous – the knowledge that so much weight was held above by man-made materials, and that if fate decided today was the day and the tunnel collapsed, it was far too long for her to hope to reach the other side without becoming buried.

That had to be the most awful way to die – buried alive beneath the earth.

Though going back home to the site of teenage heartbreak had to be the second-most-awful option, she added to herself as she made it through the tunnel. For a while, the dense forest on either side obscured her view, and then it opened up into farmlands, and the sparse buildings thickened into little communities not big enough to earn the title of town. Finally, she caught glimpses of the river that snaked from the coast inland and was the lifeblood of the region.

A sign declared “Welcome to Havermouth”, and she read “originally the Havers Settlement” before the writing grew too small for her to read as she drove past. Who gave a f**k anyway? She told herself. She was there for a week, two tops. Empty the house out, put it on the market, go to the funeral, and then get the f**k out of dodge.

And maybe encounter a familiar face or three along the way.

Fuck. That thought had her heart pounding. What did they look like now? Would that spark that had burned between them have fizzled out completely in the last five years? Were they married? Would they even remember who she was?

What would she say to them? There was so much hurt and resentment still within her. Despite everything that they’d done, and everything that they hadn’t done, she had thought that there had been something between them. She wasn’t sure what precisely that something was, but on her side at least, there had been something. Perhaps it had just been loneliness, and her vivid imagination that had led her to feel that maybe, just maybe, there had been something there for them as well?

But if there had been, why had they never come after her? Why not call her in Rideten? Why not visit her? The one time she’d managed to talk to Heath on the phone, he’d told her to stop calling and she had listened, but the connection had been so bad she still didn’t quite believe that he had meant what he said.

“Oh f**k,” she said as she drove past the new Havermouth train station. She was really there. Really back in Havermouth.

She just hoped that things went better this time round.