Dark Tides Read Online Free

in the rear of the Fiesta. His features were shadowed and indistinct. But I recognised him all the same.
    He was attractive in a rugged, knocked-about kind of way. He had a square face, low brow, thick eyebrows. His two front teeth were crooked and his nose was flattened, as if it had been broken at some point in the past. I was almost certain it had been. I knew he had a reputation for getting into fights. I knew he’d been in trouble with the police many times. He stole things, or so I’d heard.
    ‘I’m Mark.’ He pointed towards the ghost with the wandering hands. ‘That’s Callum. And he’s Scott,’ he added, nodding at Dracula.
    ‘Having fun?’ There was a reedy quaver in Scott’s voice, as if it hadn’t fully broken yet.
    I shrugged.
    ‘You will. Best part’s coming up.’
    David drove on towards Bride, the island’s northernmost village, then turned off on to a rutted track. We bounced and thumped over potholes and through deep, muddy puddles, our elbows and knees jabbing into one another, the Fiesta’s headlamps lancing up into the cloudy night sky. The land was mostly flat all around. A mix of sandy earth, mossy grass, heather and gorse. Up ahead, I could just make out a windswept bank of reed-fringed dunes, a gravel turning circle and a small brick building with a lone electric lamp shining outside.
    The building was a visitors’ centre for the Ayres nature reserve. I’d been up here before on a biology trip. We’d been made to carry out some fieldwork – throw a set square, count the plants and insects, that kind of thing. I knew there were rare species here. A few lizards. Some fancy orchid you couldn’t find anywhere else on the island. It was a popular area with bird watchers, nature lovers and ramblers during the day.
    It was completely deserted at night.
    David killed the lights and the engine, cutting off Shaggy’s ‘It Wasn’t Me’ midway through. A harsh wind tore in from the sea, across the dunes, blustering against the windows and rocking the Fiesta on its chassis.
    Scott clicked on the dome light above him. He turned in his seat and flipped his mask up on top of his head. His cheeks were mottled with acne, his fine red hair clipped into a straight fringe across the top of his forehead. School was filled with boys just like him. Boys held so tight in the grip of adolescence that they looked as if they might never grow into men.
    ‘How much do you know about Hop-tu-naa?’ he asked me, his voice pitching and screeching unpredictably.
    I felt my mouth twist up. Way more than I wanted to, I almost said. But I didn’t. I stayed silent.
    ‘Do you know about mummers?’
    I chewed the side of my mouth.
    ‘Look, you probably already know that Hop-tu-naa is a Celtic festival, right? Everyone knows that. But way back when it all started, there used to be this tradition of mummers. People would dress in disguises, call from house to house, sing nonsense songs.’
    Rachel giggled into the neck of the vodka bottle. I noticed that Callum’s hands had slid up a little higher.
    ‘But that’s not all they did,’ Scott said, ignoring the interruption. ‘They’d also carry out pranks or dares. Boys would knock on doors with turnips.’
    David turned and smiled kindly at me, one hand still gripping the steering wheel. ‘What he’s trying to tell you is that we do the same thing. As a group, I mean.’
    I stared at him. ‘You knock on people’s doors with turnips?’
    ‘No. But we do dares. Every year we take it in turns to choose.’
    I thought of the singing and how I hadn’t participated in it. Had I failed some kind of unspoken test? That didn’t seem very fair.
    ‘I drove us out here because this is where Callum wanted us to come. He got to pick the dare this year.’
    I turned to my left. Callum still hadn’t removed his ghost mask. He nodded at me from behind Rachel’s shoulder, the haunted expression of woeful despair sliding up and down in the dark.
    ‘Are you scared?’