Nightmares
I started to have nightmares. I kept dreaming I was in an old-fashioned English hedgerow maze with high, green walls being chased by a man in a frizzy-headed clown mask with a hideous grin and crazy red makeup, a bit like the Joker in Batman. I managed to escape each time only to race around a corner and continually come up against a dead end. The man would appear from behind and slowly remove his mask. The first time it happened he turned out to be Jim Carrey with a real goofy expression, just like in Ace Ventura. The next night it was Vince.
I woke up heaving for breath.
I stayed home from school all that week. I just couldn’t face the thought of sitting in class and having everyone staring at me, whispering: “Did you hear what happened to Stacey? A stalker is after her. Yeah, but you know what she did at the Video Saloon? Pirating. That’s what happens to you when you get mixed up in weird crap. It’s karma. Man, what comes around, goes around. She deserved it.” Paranoid, yeah, and I must have had a hundred of these little scenarios playing around in my head each day.
I also spent a lot of time thinking. Why would someone want to hurt me? Had the intruder waited for weeks to make his move until he knew I was alone? How did he get out of the store after I locked it? And there was virtually no time between the phone calls and the chase. With a chill I realised the intruder must have been calling when he was already inside the store. He must have been squatting down near the children’s or horror section at the front of the store where I couldn’t see him. In the shadows, sneering, laughing at me. Waiting for the lights to go out. It mad me mad that someone could make me so scared, make me feel so vulnerable. How dare he? Nobody had the right to do that to anyone else.
Dad took a week off even though I knew he couldn’t afford it, he’d already taken up his sick leave months ago. Then Officer Miller visited to talk about the stalker. They didn’t have any suspects and he wanted to know if I’d been hassled since.
I didn’t tell him anything useful, although I was tempted. I kept hearing Caitlin’s plea: “Don’t tell the police.” So I just went through the motions, retelling him about what happened that night – the phone calls, the chase, escaping. That was it. Any idea of who it was? No. Any previous anonymous calls or unwanted attention from customers? I thought of Eric, but how could I explain it? No, I said, nothing. I didn’t have any idea who it could have been.
A journalist from the local Rosedale Leader paper phoned, as well as a couple of kids from school, but apart from Skye and Topps I didn’t really want to talk to anyone.
By Thursday, however, I just wanted to get out of the house. I felt claustrophobic. Topps, who’d come around with Skye each day after school, brought over a cutting from The Herald-Sun newspaper’s “CrimeStoppers” page. The headline read: “Girl Terrorised in Video Store”. It felt bizarre reading about myself:
Police have requested information from the public after a store assistant was terrorised by a masked intruder on Saturday night. The fifteen-year-old girl was alone at The Video Saloon, in Melbourne’s outer eastern suburb of Rosedale when the intruder entered the store around 10pm. After a brief struggle, the girl escaped from the store.
The man is described as being around 185cms tall and wearing a black jeans and black jumper. Crimestoppers wants to hear from any member of the public who may have seen a man acting suspiciously around the video store on Main Street, Rosedale, around 10pm that night.
‘How cool is that, Stace, you’re in the newspaper!’ said Topps, pinning the article on my little cork notice board above my bed. ‘Yeah, but I’d rather not be on the Crimestoppers page along with a bunch of graffiti artists from Noble Park and a serial bank robber,’ I said, scanning the rest of the page.
‘How are you feeling?’ Topps dumped himself next to me on the bed. I noticed one half of his shirt collar was stuck under his school jumper, so I reached over and pulled it out, then straightened his collar.
‘Better. Sick of being in the house now. Might go for a walk of you want to come,’ I said, folding the collar neatly along the seam. ‘There, that looks better. You were probably wearing that collar crooked all day.’
‘Yeah, thanks Mum,’ said Topps. ‘But it’s great you want to get out. I thought you were becoming like some sort of hermit with a phobia. You know the ones, they get hives every time they leave their house.’
‘Well, I was chased around the store by a ski-masked maniac. I think I deserve a little understanding,’ I said testily. I didn’t like the insinuation that staying inside all week somehow indicated I had become a bit mental. Truthfully, I was getting worried myself in case that was exactly what was happening to me. It was like that kid from year eleven at school who was beaten up by a group of older guys at a party after an argument over beer. He had had his nose and a rib broken. Apparently he was so traumatised he refused to go to school anymore. His mum had to home-school him for the rest of the year and he spent the weekends in his room on the Internet and eating peanut butter sandwiches on white bread for dinner. Or at least that was the story.
‘Sorry Stacey, it’s not as if I wouldn’t have done the same. It’s just that I was worried about you,’ said Topps, placing his hand on my knee to placate me. ‘I didn’t want to have to be slipping messages under your bedroom door in a year’s time.’
I stood up and laughed. ‘Yeah, I could become like Howard Hughes. I could grow my hair to my knees and my fingernails would be so long, they’d be curled like a RollUp.’
‘You could use them as a tape measure.’ ‘Gross.’ Howard Hughes was a very, very strange American billionaire who had gone off his head and become a recluse, lying in bed for twenty years in hotel rooms in the dark. He had a phobia about germs and used to wear Kleenex tissue boxes on his feet. Topps had read about him on Wikipedia.com for an English project and then passed the article on to me. Then we’d watched Leonardo Di Caprio in The Aviator, the film about his life, but we were both disappointed the tissue boxes and long fingernails hadn’t featured prominently.
I sighed. ‘Topps, we may as well get this over and done with so I can get it out of my system. C’mon, let’s go for a walk. I’m sick of being inside.’
Dad was sitting in the lounge room working through a pile of bills with a worried look on his face – I knew we hadn’t paid the phone or gas bills on time – and looked up, surprised to see me heading to the door.
‘I’m going for a walk, get some fresh air,’ I told him.
‘You’ll be right?’
‘I’ll be right.’
We walked towards the park where Eric had freaked me out. As we got there I had a sudden urge, as bad as having to go to the toilet on a cold winter’s morning, and I just couldn’t keep it in anymore. I had to tell Topps everything that had happened.
‘Topps, you know those pirated DVDs from the basement?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well, I sort of helped Crass sell them.’
And that was it. Everything came out. Every dirty, steamy bit of it: the offer made by Crass; selling the packages; sleazy Eric; refusing to help Crass out anymore; the green bag full of DVDs; and, though I regretted it immediately, honouring Caitlin’s request not to tell the police anything.
Topps took it all in. He was quiet for a moment, which is unusual for Topps. I hoped he wouldn’t go all mad at me for helping to sell the DVDs. I couldn’t face that.
‘Firstly, man, I can’t believe you’d get in on something like that. But anyway, it’s over. You’ve done it, no use getting mad at you. But you know, though, that there’s a load of things that don’t add up here. There’s some sort of connection between Crass asking both you and Caitlin to help him out. Why would he want to do that? It’s not as if you were both vital to the business – you just handed out packages to customers. So what? He could’ve done that himself. Why’d he want to risk you guys going to the police? Why did he ask you to help?’
‘Caitlin found out what he was up to when a whole lot of pirated discs spilt from his green bag when he came back from the gym. He was sort of stuck then, I guess. If he got her involved, she wouldn’t go and tell the police.’
‘Yeah, so why did he ask you to help him then?’
‘He knew I needed the money. But I reckon he knew about the stash in the basement.’
‘Yeah! That’s got to be it! But how did he know?’
Topps was really getting into this. There was no stopping him. It was like living a real life Alex Rider teen-spy adventure.
‘I overheard Crass and that guy who was in the store with you and I when I found the first DVD,’ I said. ‘The guy was asking if Crass had got me to agree to help out with the business, and then Crass thanked him for the tip off. What a bastard! He went and told Crass! Damn. So if he’d told Crass, then Crass would have figured out I’d busted his stash. So if he gets me involved…’
‘…it’d be just like Caitlin; you wouldn’t have any reason to dob him in anymore because you’d get in trouble with the cops as well,’ Topps said, finishing my sentence for me.
It was starting to make sense, in a vague sort of way.
‘What I think is really weird is how Caitlin knew what happened with the stalker Saturday night,’ said Topps, sensing I was warming up to the mystery. ‘She comes around the next day to ask you not to squeal, but how did she know what happened?’
‘Perhaps it was on the radio or something?’
‘No one at school knew about it until the article came out in the Herald Sun. I did tell Skye and a few others and you know how fast Skye spreads gossip. But Sunday afternoon? I wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t called me.’
‘She didn’t tell me how she knew, come to think about it – but she seemed to know exactly what had happened. Not just about the intruder, but about the pirating. Probably because she was so involved herself.’
‘That’s weird as she came around though. I don’t feel real sorry for her, that’s for sure! And to think I was in love…’ Topps laughed and looked like he was about to continue with the joke when he suddenly stopped, his mouth went taunt and he stared into the distance. ‘Oh man, speak of the little red devil,’ he said, pointing to the other side of the park.
Walking down the footpath, his big heavy green bag over his shoulder, listening to a pair of headphones, was Crass. He hadn’t seen us.
I can’t explain why, but I immediately felt dizzy and wanted to run back home. ‘C’mon Topps, let’s go, I don’t want him to see me,’ I said with an icy fear in my voice.
‘You head back, Stace, I’ll see you later.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘He’s got his little green bag. I’m going to follow him.’
‘No way Topps! Don’t be stupid!’
‘I’ll be back in a minute. I want to know where he’s going with the bag.’
‘No!’
But Topps was already jogging away from me though the park.