At that, Amy found her courage. Lifting up her hockey stick, she began to sprint towards the figures, letting out a very scary, throaty, Glaswegian-sounding "Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!"
Gina, Dermot and the sixth formers followed her lead. The man let go of Min as soon as he saw the group heading towards him, sticks at the ready. He turned and began to run away.
"Aaaaaaaaargh! a.r.s.ehole!" Amy screamed, charging on, furious at the thought of this louse, this lowlife, getting away from them.
"You look after Min!" Dermot was now outrunning Gina and Amy. "We"ll get him."
So he, Helen and Milly raced across the playing field after the fleeing man while Amy and Gina ran towards Min.
Only when they were twenty metres away did they realize that it wasn"t her at all. There, dressed in a clingy black dress and a gothy black wig, holding a wine bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other, was a very annoyed-looking Mel.
"What the h.e.l.l was all that about?" she demanded.
"Mel, you stupid tart!" Amy stormed.
"Oh, I"m the stupid tart! You"ve just frightened the living daylights out of Jono. I don"t know where the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l he"s off to. Why are two jolly hockey sticks and a Shrek chasing after him? Hmm? What the h.e.l.l is going on?"
"Oh, shut up, you stupid cow." Amy was so angry and so worried, she really didn"t have a second to be polite to anyone, especially Miss Melanie Where-are-my- knickers!
"We"ve lost Min," Gina explained, on the verge of tears. "We think she"s out here with some stalker she"s met on the Internet."
"What?" Mel sounded incredulous. "Min? I saw her about ten minutes ago. She was on a bench, over there" she pointed towards the main school building "beside the school, chatting to some boy . . . A stalker?" She sounded almost impressed. "He looked pretty harmless to me but then you never can tell."
Without another word Amy and Gina turned and began to run towards the main school building. As they rounded the corner where three benches overlooked the tennis courts, they immediately caught sight of the sleek dark head of their friend. She was deep in conversation with a boy!
Amy and Gina had almost reached the bench before Min and her friend turned towards them in surprise.
"Min!" Amy shrieked. "We"ve been frantic!"
The boy stood up and looked at them nervously.
"It"s OK, Greg, these are my friends," Min a.s.sured him.
"Greg?" Gina asked. "Are you the Gecko?"
Greg, who looked about fifteen or sixteen, just like them, had a friendly, freckly face surrounded by a thick mop of brown hair. He was dressed in jeans and a casual jacket over a T-shirt with a green lizard design on the front. Maybe this was how Min was supposed to recognize him or something.
He smiled at them shyly, before saying, "h.e.l.lo . . . Amy and Gina?"
"Yeah," they replied together.
He certainly didn"t look like a scary stalker. He looked sweet. He looked like just the kind of person Min would really like to hang out with.
"You should have told me!" Amy scolded Min. "We thought you were out here with some stranger who tracked you down on the Internet!"
This made Min laugh. "Well . . . it was a bit like that," she joked.
"Oh, thanks," Greg said.
"No! I"m joking," Min told him. "I think you can trust a boy who knows the value of pi to forty-two decimal places." She couldn"t stifle a giggle at this.
"Right, well, if you say so!" was Gina"s baffled comment.
"I think you should know that Dermot and two sixth formers are out there somewhere chasing Mel"s latest conquest because they think he"s your stalker," Amy pointed out.
"Really?" Min was taken aback.
"I hope they"re OK," Gina added.
"I think Shrek can take care of himself," Amy rea.s.sured her. She hugged her arms around herself, realizing how cold she was and her feet : they were totally soaked through!
"You know," she urged her friends, "we"re going to have to get back to the boarding house before Mrs K notices there"s something going on. Dermot and co. might even be back by now."
"Well, erm . . . nice to meet you," Greg said to Amy and Gina.
"Yeah we must do this again in daylight some time," Amy teased.
But all Greg"s attention had turned back to Min. "Very nice to meet you, finally," he told her, a broad smile breaking over his face. "Would you like to come out with me next Sat.u.r.day? We could-"
"Yes!" Min answered, before he could even finish.
He held out his hand for her to shake, but Min electrified her audience by leaning forward and kissing him on the cheek.
Amy so wanted to call out, Wooooooo-hoooooo, but she managed to restrain herself. This was Min. This was very fragile, tender territory. She couldn"t step in and mess it all up.
"Goodnight," Min said to Greg before he turned and walked off into the darkness.
Arm in arm, joking and teasing each other about the events of the last hour, the three girls made their way down onto the path back to the boarding house.
It was cold and windy now. The trees were making shadows dance across the playing field and it was impossible not to feel slightly spooked. Instinctively, the three hurried towards the cosy warmth of the party.
Past a clump of bushy shrubs they went, then into the house garden where they saw a tall figure, shrouded in black, with the horrible scream mask covering its face, heading towards the house.
This was just too much for Amy: she couldn"t stop herself from letting out a bloodcurdling scream, which stopped the figure in its tracks.
It turned and, to their horror, began to speed towards them.
"No! No! No!" Amy was gasping. "Do something!"
She pushed Gina, who was still holding a hockey stick, forward.
"Leave us alone," Gina ordered in a shaky voice, her stick held across her body unconvincingly.
The figure kept on coming towards them.
"Go away!" Everyone could hear the terror in Gina"s voice.
"I"m calling the police!" Min blurted out. "Leave us alone."
Then, to their horror, the figure began to laugh. It actually threw back its head and roared with laughter.
Just as both Gina and Min, their bodies shaking with fear, decided that this was the scariest thing they had ever witnessed and they were never leaving the house on Halloween or any other night, ever again, Amy let out a furious cry.
"Niffy!" she shouted. "You hideous old bag! . . . Niffy!" she bellowed again, and started to march towards the figure.
Niffy? Gina and Min were still clutching each other, unable to believe that Amy was right.
But sure enough, the figure now said, "OK! Take it easy," in an oh-so-familiar plummy voice, and began to back away with her hands up.
No use.
Amy, absolutely livid, grabbed her friend by the shoulders and shook her. "How dare you scare us," she shouted, "after the night we"ve had!"
"All right!" Niffy pushed Amy"s hands away from her shoulders and pulled off the horrible mask.
They saw now that she wasn"t in fancy dress at all. She was just wearing dark jeans, a jumper and a mac, with a bulky messenger bag slung across her body.
"I found the mask in the garden and I couldn"t resist . . ." Niffy began. "I know how scared you-"
"Shut up!" Amy instructed her. "We"ve got quite enough on without you b.l.o.o.d.y showing up and giving us the scare of our lives." The hairs on the back of her neck were still standing up and she felt as if they would never go down again.
"What on earth are you doing here, Niffy?" Min asked finally.
In a voice that managed to get almost all the way to the end of the sentence without too much of a wobble, Niffy began, "I"m here, buddies, because my mum got her first all-clear today. I just jumped on the train because I knew, even though it"s bonkers, that I had to tell . . . erm" here was the wobble "tell you all in person."
Chapter Twenty-eight.
The front door of the boarding house burst open and teenagers, teachers, Mrs Knebworth even the DJ all began to rush out.
Word had spread. Milly, Helen and some younger girls were out on the playing fields trying to rescue someone! It had started as a whisper, grown to a rumour and then become a fully fledged panic.
On the dance floor the music had come to an abrupt halt as the plug was pulled out. Couples entangled in various cushioned areas were left redfaced as bright overhead lights were snapped on. Questions couldn"t be answered quickly enough.
"A stalker?" Mrs Knebworth was booming. "Asimina Singupta has a stalker?" She couldn"t have sounded more incredulous. "People are out there fighting with him? Good gracious!"
However, the Neb was made of stern Edinburgh stuff. She hadn"t flapped, she hadn"t panicked. She"d calmly instructed the St Lennox teachers and several of the burliest Frankensteins, Draculas and mad monks to get out there and discover what was going on.
But now here was Min, making her way through the crowds of people towards the boarding house, apparently completely calm and unruffled.
"Where on earth have you girls been?" Mrs Knebworth boomed at the Irises as soon as she spotted them. "And Luella Nairn-Ba.s.sett?" she added, her eyebrows shooting up almost into her hair. "What in the name of goodness are you doing here?"
But before the question could be answered, there were loud shouts and a series of cheers from the far corner of the garden.
Dermot and the two sixth formers were coming towards the house. All three looked a little the worse for wear. The girls were muddy, with ruffled hair, but Dermot"s Shrek costume was completely mangled. Half of his face mask had torn away and his eye was swollen and bleeding.
Gina ran across the garden towards them. "Are you all OK?" she asked them, but she had eyes only for Dermot"s battered face. "Did he attack you?" she exclaimed.
"No, no," Dermot a.s.sured her. "I"m just a total pillock who took a tumble."
"We chased him towards the embankment," Helen explained, "but he got away and then Dermot lost his footing."
"You fell down the embankment?" Gina asked. She had once gone to the school"s boundary fence and looked down there. It was a long steep drop.
"Thank goodness for the padding," Dermot said, patting his costume, "or things would have been a lot nastier for me down at the bottom."
"You rolled all the way down?" Gina asked again.
"I know . . . total pillock," Dermot added.
But nevertheless, Gina slipped her hand into his and squeezed it hard.
Amy was standing beside them now. "Unfortunately you were chasing Mel"s boyfriend, not Min"s stalker."
"You"ve got to stop calling him that," Min chipped in. "I"m never, ever going to live this down."
"What!" Milly exclaimed. "Mel"s boyfriend! But we"ve even got his shoe!" She held up a muddied white trainer.
"Let me take a look at that!" Mrs Knebworth was out in the garden now.
She took hold of the trainer and brought it up to the light at the front door. After a close inspection of the sole, she announced to everyone who would listen everyone who wasn"t already talking, asking, answering, describing or speculating "I think we"ve found our prowler! Will everyone who knows anything about all this come into my sitting room right now?" she ordered. "And everyone else" she looked at the large group of teenagers spread out over her garden, trampling the flowers, scuffing the lawn, stamping over the newly dug beds "get straight back inside and party, for heaven"s sake!"
In the midst of the noisy, thronging crowd making its way from the garden back into the boarding house, Gina turned to Dermot. They gazed at each other, their fingers linked together, and just like in the sculpture gardens, it no longer mattered who else was there. They were alone together.
There was no Scarlett, Gina realized with a fizzy rush of happiness. There was just Dermot, and he was so, so into her! And that, she realized as she felt his warm mouth pressed against hers, was something very special. Something very well worth having.
When the kiss finally ended, Dermot leaned in against her ear and whispered, "Eat your heart out, Scarlett!"
Gina couldn"t think of anything to say, so she just settled for kissing his salty and slightly muddy neck instead.
"I quite like you," Dermot breathed against the side of her head.
"I really quite like you too," she told him back.
"Gina Peterson!"
Gina was vaguely aware that the Neb was calling her name.
"My sitting room!" the housemistress instructed.
"And Olly Hughes better bring himself along as well."
There was a lecture, of course. All about leaving the boarding house without permission and making friends on the Internet, and did they have any idea what danger they"d placed themselves in tonight? But, funnily enough, it didn"t seem to last long.