The Barn Run - Part 5

“Don’t start yet,” Jojo said. He was just out the nettle forest, and turned away from us. A stream of urine splashed dry soil and dusty nettle leaves.

“Typical,” Stephi said, then to me, “You want to leave a marker, too?”

I told her, “Nah. I can wait,” then asked, “You?”

“With you two here?” she said. “Yeah, right.”

My guess was even if we weren’t there she’d have waited. My eyes drifted across the field. “Have people really gone missing on a run?”

“You think I’d lie about something like that?” she said.

I told her no, but at my last school there was this kid, Jenno, who lived round the corner from me. One day he wasn’t there; overnight, his brain haemorrhaged and he was dead when his folks found him in the morning. I was at the funeral a week later; I knew how he died . . . but the story went around school of how he was kidnapped by a paedo ring and Interpol had him pinpointed to a child brothel in Thailand. Stories get around.

Stephi told me the names: Tommy Sanderson, Billy Moon, Wes Cantley, Ella and Jess Berkely. Ella and Jess, she said, they were in her year. The others, she didn’t know them, but Ella and Jess, the twins, nobody talked about them since they’d gone.

“And Katie Walters lived down my street,” Jojo said. “Gone too.” His flow turned to a trickle, turned to spurts and dribbles. "She was only five. Her mum was walking home, past the fields. One of the other kids tripped, so she turned to dust her down and rub her knees. When she turned back, Katie was gone."

In daylight you can make sense of these stories, deny them and tear them apart, but it’s like all logical reasoning stops working in the dark, like common sense is solar powered, and every word is believable.

There was no time to discuss or debate because Stephi was facing the field again.

“What you are about to learn, you will tell all others at this moment of their Run, and you will tell them to pass it on in the same way,” she said, and went on to explain how the Run was a figure of eight, the symbol for infinity, because the Run will last forever; and that we’d take the path of every other run, up the side of the barn, anti clockwise around the farmhouse, down the other side of the barn, past the spot where Cassie buried her murdered husband, to where we stood, and then through the nettle bowery and to the stile. Only when we’d crossed the stile would the Run be over and we’d be known as Runners for the remainder of our days.

When it came to dramatising, Stephi was good. She was very good.

“Through the nettles?” Jojo said. “I just pissed there.”

But he couldn’t steal the seriousness from Stephi's tone. “The fields have hands,” she warned us. “The house has eyes. The Devil waits in every shadow.”

And then, turning to face us she added, “Death will come to those who turn back.”

“Let’s do it,” Jojo said, and in the half-light shadows of the moon, Stephi smiled like she enjoyed this more than any other prank of childish mischief, and she said, "Run!"