Subliminal

How badly do you have to want something before your imagination makes it real?

When Carrie Fraser is given a second-hand piano, it seems as though all her dreams have come true. But then she meets the mysterious Danny. Is he real, or a ghost? Or is he just a figment of Carrie's imagination?

 

Things I hate.

Lu Wilton!

Miss Coulson!

Detention!

Buses!

I hate them all! In that order!

Fight with Lu equals lecture on being a lady from Coulson, equals detention, equals I missed the thirty-seven bus and ended up having to catch the twenty-nine. The twenty-nine doesn't go as far as our road, so I had to get off at the crossroads and walk a mile up the lane. On my own. In the dark. Well OK, not dark, exactly, but near enough. Look, it was nearly five. You get the picture.

Only tonight, I wasn't on my own. I was being followed. I was about to be assaulted, murdered, or worse, by some psycho, all because Lu Wilton thought pouring coffee over my sandwiches - by-accident-on-purpose, of course - was funny.

Well, what was I supposed to do? I mean, she'd rendered my lunch completely inedible. Under the circumstances I think smushing the whole soggy mess down her shirt front was a perfectly reasonable course of action. Of course, she goes off crying to Coulson and yours truly ends up with a week's worth of detentions. Plus I had to apologise to Lu. Plus I had to buy a new school shirt for her out of my savings.

And now I was being stalked.

I knew him. Sort of. I'd seen him at the station a couple of times, when I'd stopped off on the way home to watch the trains. He was probably in his twenties, a bit scruffy, and wore clothes that looked like they'd come from a charity shop. But he had the most amazing blonde hair, clean looking, totally at odds with the rest of his appearance. He never said anything, never did anything. Just sat there until the three-forty-three had gone through, then disappeared. He'd smile occasionally, and we'd nod a greeting, and that was OK.

Following me home, though? That wasn't OK.

It was the sound of his footsteps I noticed first. I couldn't figure it out. The only time anyone walks the lane is to get from the twenty-nine bus stop to the estate, and I was pretty certain I'd been the only one who'd got off the bus back there.

I once watched a programme on television that said if you think you're being followed, you should act as though you're not scared, and make a big point of looking around to see who it is. So I did. Very quickly, and then back again, without changing my pace at all. It was him alright.

I kept on walking, and quickened my pace a little. So did he. I turned again. No sign of him this time. I guessed he'd managed to hide in the hedge somewhere, though, because those footsteps were there again when I walked on.

Just a little further along, the lane weaves through a couple of bends and the hedgerows give way to open fields. It stays open then all the way to the end of our road, and begins to lighten a little as the streetlights ahead come into view. When I reached that point, Blondie's footsteps still scuffing along on the road behind me, I turned.

You know what I'm going to say, don't you? Yep! No one. That's when I became really scared. I'm not saying I hadn't been a bit worried before that, but part of me was still remembering how nice he'd seemed at the station. He'd never actually said anything, but he just didn't look the type, somehow. They never do though, do they? You hear all sorts of tales about nice blokes who get friendly with teenage girls and then turn out to be not so nice after all. And here I was about to become the next victim. If he really was OK, I thought, then he wouldn't mind about being seen. But if he was so desperate as to find a hiding place where there were, seemingly, none …

I could see the streetlights now, and the headlights of a car skimming across the top road. I gathered my bag under my arm and ran all the way home.