First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2017

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Text copyright © Stacy Gregg, 2017

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Stacy Gregg asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008257019

Ebook Edition © 2017 ISBN: 9780008257026

Version: 2017-09-05

My heartfelt thanks to clinical psychologist Hilary Mack for his support and advice, and to Suzanne Winterflood, who kept my feet on the ground in this year of earthquakes.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1: The Bringer

Chapter 2: One Year Ago – How I First Became a Thunder God

Chapter 3: The Minotaur

Chapter 4: The Sacrifices

Chapter 5: Pegasus and Athena

Chapter 6: Seven-Point-Eight

Chapter 7: Moxy and the River Styx

Chapter 8: Trapped

Chapter 9: The Odyssey

Chapter 10: Helen of the Hundalees

Chapter 11: The Riddle of the Sphinx

Chapter 12: Creatures of Poseidon

Chapter 13: The Gates to Tartarus

Chapter 14: Six Legs at Dusk

Chapter 15: Pegasus, Son of the Sea God

Chapter 16: Coming Home

Epilogue – Six Months Later

Keep Reading

Other books by Stacy Gregg

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1
The Bringer

On the top of Mount Parnassus, in the grand temple where the gods hang out, I am struggling to load my thunderbolts into the two white sacks strapped on to Gus’s back.

“Stand still!” I use a firm tone with my pony as he fidgets. “This is hard enough without you messing about.” The thunderbolts have these sharp, pointy edges that make them almost impossible to stuff into the sack and I’m trying not to jab Gus in the flank, but I’m in a desperate hurry. The white fluffy clouds beneath my feet are trembling. The whole mountain is shaking from the bottom up. There isn’t much time – we need to get out of here.

“Evie!”

A voice booms through the temple and I turn round to see Zeus striding towards me across the clouds, white robes flowing behind him.

“Put the thunderbolts down, Evie.”

I ignore him and continue packing. I can’t stop now and leave the job half done. That would drive me mad. Two thunderbolts absolutely must go in each sack. Two plus two. An even number. I must get the ritual right, do it in sequence, or terrible things will happen. But then terrible things are already happening. The ground thunder is coming. I can feel its rumble beneath my feet, unstoppable and uncontrollable.

“Evie –” Zeus is beside me – “I want you to tell me how much anxiety you would feel, on a scale of one to ten, if you stopped doing this right now?”

His voice is soft, reassuring, and suddenly I realise that beneath his big white fluffy beard Zeus is not a Greek god at all but actually Willard Fox, my psychologist.

“Evie,” Willard says, “this is the OCD trying to trick you. I know you want to make everyone safe, but you cannot control what is to come. There are things in the universe beyond your powers …”

I feel tears prick my eyes when he says this. I want to stop the rituals. I don’t want to be OCD’s slave any more, but I’m so scared. And the earthquake is here now. The shaking that has been rocking the mountain is growing stronger and the air around us turns electric as the thunder rolls under our feet.

Laden with his pannier bags full of thunderbolts, Gus has been getting more and more agitated and suddenly, with a panic-stricken jerk, he wrenches free of my grasp. I lunge at his reins.

“Gus!”

He gallops off and I break into a run, chasing after him, but then the clouds disintegrate beneath my feet and suddenly I am wheeling through the sky. It’s like falling from a plane. Air rushes by me with incredible speed. I look down and I can see Parnassus far below. Not Parnassus the Greek mountain, but my own Parnassus. The small South Island town in New Zealand where I have lived for all twelve years of my life. Parnassus looks very different from above. I can see the rust-red rooftop of the town hall, and the dairy, and Wrightsons farm supplies, and along from the shops is my school, five classrooms set out in a horseshoe, and the chestnut trees bordering the green expanse of the playing fields. The main street looms up towards me as I plummet headlong. Even as I’m falling, in my death plunge I get this sense of wonder, because there’s something cool about seeing the town from above. It all looks so tiny, but then Parnassus is pretty weeny. Mum says the tourists blink and miss it when they drive through on the way to watch the whales in Kaikoura, further up the main state highway where the road hugs the coastline of the Southern Ocean.

I can see our farm as I free-fall. The big oak marking out the lawn beside our villa with its green roof and the driveway to the stable block and the steel grey of the milking sheds. It must be almost milking time because the cows are coming in, moving slowly down the track to the shed as Jock, my Border collie, runs behind them. He’s barking his head off and the noise of his bark is almost as loud as the rumble of the earth, and even though I am in mid-air I can still feel everything shaking. The green fields are coming towards me super-fast now and I brace myself. I take a deep breath and prepare for the fact that I’m about to crash-land head first into the ground …

And then, with a jolt and a heave, I wake up.

I’m surrounded by pitch black. Something heavy is crushing my ribs and pinning me down, and beneath me the ground is bucking and rumbling with a noise like a train.

It feels so raw and so close this time in the darkness, lying here on the ground in a pup tent, with nothing between me and the rolling, turbulent earth. It was different in the first quake two days ago. I was asleep that time too and the quake threw me clean out of bed. I remember grabbing my backpack and me and Jock running for our lives as the house collapsed and feeling the cold jolt of realisation that Mum wasn’t with us, then turning back and seeing her lying on the lawn, not moving. That was the quake that destroyed Parnassus and started all of this. The evacuation and my mum being taken away in the rescue helicopter, the others taking the inland road to meet the rescue ship at Kaikoura.

They all wanted me to go with them, but I couldn’t. I had to make my own way. I chant the names in my head: Parnassus, Hawkswood, Ferniehurst, Hundalee, the Stag and Spey, Kaikoura. This is our journey. Me and Gus and Moxy and Jock …

“Jock?”

The heavy weight that’s been squashing my ribs gives a whimper and I realise it’s him on top of me.

As he struggles to stand up, he shoves his paws deep into the soft bit of my stomach. I give a squeal as his claws dig into my flesh, but before I can push him off me the ground gives another hard buck that throws both of us flat. The impact leaves me winded and I can’t get any breath into my lungs. I begin to hyperventilate and it’s like I’m going to die from not breathing and the more I think about dying the more I can’t breathe and I begin to make these choking, gasping cries.

You want to know where I am right now on a scale of one to ten, Willard? I am a million!

And then the ground stops. I lie there, panting like a dog and shaking. My heart is hammering in my chest and I still can’t get any air into my lungs. I’m gulping, trying to make my breath work again. And then my hot skin goes goosebumpy as I feel something cold and hard against my thigh. Torch! I grab for it and as soon as I have it in my hand I flick the switch and suddenly the tiny black space of my pup tent is illuminated. The first thing I see is Jock’s eyes shining back at me in the light and I nearly scream at the sight of him because he looks deranged, all wild and wolfish with his hackles raised. He gives this low, panic-stricken growl, and at the same time another sound choruses in, an awful howling noise like a baby bawling. It’s Moxy. She must still be in here somewhere, but even with the torchlight on I can’t find her.

“Moxy!” I begin to burrow through the bunched-up folds of sleeping bag.

“Moxy?”

Moxy has worked herself head first into the bottom of my sleeping bag. I worry that she’s dug herself in so deep she’s going to suffocate, but when I try to pick her up she hisses and lashes out with a paw, swiping viciously at me. I take her seriously since I still have scars on my arm from the last time. I leave her alone and unzip the tent and squirm out of the flap with Jock behind me and then zip Moxy in. I don’t want her to escape and get lost.

Outside the tent the night is totally black. There’s not a flicker of light, no houses for miles in any direction. Parnassus is not exactly bright-city-lights, but the hills of Hawkswood are really remote. This is the middle of nowhere and it’s just me and my cat and my dog. And somewhere, out there in the dense black nothing that surrounds us now, is my horse.

When the big earthquake, the seven-point-eight, shook me out of bed in Parnassus, there was a full moon to see by. Tonight the moon is clouded, the stars seem faint and distant, and the beam of my torch is gutless, so I can’t see more than a couple of metres in any direction. For all I know, the earthquake might have destroyed the land all around me. Maybe everything has slid away and right now I’m perched on a cliff edge. I shine the torch beam as far as it can go and stand rooted to the spot. I turn slowly round, trying to find the tree that I tethered Gus to before I went to bed.

“Gus?”

No answer. I keep circling with my torch beam and then I see the tree. The torch beam wobbles as I search for him.

“Gus!”

My heart sinks. There’s the branch where I tied his rope off, and the rope too, but I can’t see him.

My eyes blur with hot tears. I’m having trouble breathing again.

The rope is frayed at the end where he strained and broke free. I feel bad when I think about how terrified he must have been to destroy the rope. But of course he was afraid. I had Jock and Moxy with me when the quake struck. Gus had no one.

This is the second time that Gus has been alone when the quakes rolled. The first time was the big one, back in Parnassus. Was it really only two days ago? It feels like a lifetime ago now. When Mum was about to be airlifted to hospital in the helicopter, she told me that Gus would be fine on his own. But she never saw how he was after the first quake struck, the pure terror in him. He’ll be feeling that same fear again right now, and once again I’ve let him down because I wasn’t with him.

I should have slept with him. Like a Bedouin nomad who brings his horse into his tent to sleep right beside him for safety. That’s what I should have done with Gus.

He’s an Arab – you’d know that straight away if you saw him, with that delicate dapple-grey coat and skinny ballerina legs and his pretty dished face. I should have taken him inside my tent, except it’s only a pup tent and it’s way too small. It could barely fit me and the dog and cat. So why didn’t I sleep outside under the tree with him? We should never have been apart. This is all my fault. Who leaves their best friend alone like that?

I shine the torch around again, like I still expect Gus to magically appear beneath the tree. Then I walk back to the tent with Jock hugging so close to me he’s almost wrapped round my thigh. Working dogs usually stick close, but Jock is like glue and I know he’s worried that we’re going to lose each other too.

“Good boy,” I reassure him with a pat on his head, and then I bend down and unzip the tent very carefully, making the smallest gap possible to let us both back in and at the same time make sure Moxy won’t bolt out. We’ve been through enough in the past few days and I don’t want to lose her again. I want to look for Gus, but first there’s something I need to do. I can see Willard Fox at this moment looking down from the clouds still dressed as Zeus with his beard and everything, frowning as he tells me that OCD is a war. “In a war, Evie, you can’t win every battle. Sometimes you have to accept a loss or two. But you can still win the war.”

On a night like this, my OCD is too hard to fight. And so I give in to the urges, and once Jock and I are back inside the tent and all zipped up, I begin the rituals.

I pick up my backpack and undo the side pocket. Then I do up the zip and then I unzip it again. Unzip-zip-unzip and already I feel a lot better. My heart isn’t pounding so hard in my chest any more, but my hands are still shaking as I take the contents out of the pocket and lay them in front of me in the torchlight. There are four items: a gold pen that writes with blue ink, an old takeaway container, a pair of glasses and a pocket notebook.

Somewhere out there in the dark, Gus is lost and I need to find him. But I can’t go yet. I want desperately to go and search for my pony, but the rituals override logic and compel me to continue.

I line up the objects like precious artefacts in a museum. I check them and rearrange their position and then I stack them back in the pocket of my bag in precisely the right formation and I zip it up again. I do this twice over, and then I am done. My heartbeat slows further. I can breathe now. The air goes in and out and there’s a lightness in my chest. I am ready.

When I emerge from the tent this time, I have my backpack on and I feel better because I’ve done things right. All the same, I feel like it still might not be enough protection. And I know I should have done more last night before I went to bed.

If I’d done the rituals better then maybe this earthquake wouldn’t have come.

If Willard Fox was here right now, he’d tell me that my rituals are not going to change the world … that they wouldn’t stop an earthquake. I am not responsible for saving the fate of others or even myself. “Evie,” he’d say, “do you really think a twelve-year-old girl can unleash catastrophe? That you are capable of killing everyone you love and care about, including Jock and Moxy and Gus? Because if you can do this, Evie, then I’m pretty sure that one of those super-secret spy agencies like the CIA would have got in touch with you by now. They could use someone like you. Powers of mass destruction. They’d want to harness that, right?”

The way he says it, it isn’t cruel or sarcastic. He’s not mocking my abilities. Willard is truly asking me the question. Do I really in my heart believe it’s because of me? Am I the one responsible for all of this?

Sometimes I believe him and I know it’s not real. Other times, like right now, I lose faith, I fall back on the rituals.

I know I could have done them better. But it’s been hard because I’m not at home any more. I’m in a tent, camping out, with no one around to help me and everything keeps changing. I am trying to do it right but I know I’ve been failing.

The gods of Parnassus up high on those fluffy clouds are watching me and they see it. They know it’s all my fault. That is the burden of my powers, and if Willard was to ask me right now at this very moment if I caused all of this I would tell him the truth and say, Yes, yes of course it’s me. It’s always been me.

My name is Evie Violet Van Zwanenberg and I am the harbinger of a power so dark that, if I cannot control it, I will destroy the world. I am no ordinary twelve-year-old girl. I have thunderbolts in my fingertips and lightning in my veins. I am the end of days. I am the bringer of earthquakes.

CHAPTER 2
One Year Ago – How I First Became a Thunder God

I walk the blue line with Mum beside me in the hospital. It traces our path on the linoleum floor past A&E where feverish, pale children sit quietly beside their anxious mothers. Past the x-ray rooms where they plaster the bones broken in trampoline accidents. Then through the double doors and we are on the main ward, and as I walk I cast my gaze through an open curtain and I see a girl about my age lying asleep in her bed with tubes in her arm and in her nose, and I think, “Poor kid, she looks sick.”

That’s the thing. I don’t think of myself as being like her. But I’m in hospital, aren’t I? There is something wrong with me. You just can’t see it.

We keep walking through another set of double doors, still following that blue line, and now we are in a reception area and the sign on the wall by the desk is printed in clear black type on white: Adolescent Mental Health.

Mum approaches the nurse. “I have Evie Van Zwanenberg here for her ten am appointment with Willard Fox.”

I don’t like it here. “Hospital” is supposed to be where you go to get made better, but to me it’s a place where people go to die.

I’m in the same building now where my dad used to be. Only to get to his ward we used to follow a different line, a red one. It would take us through from the car park and the heavy double doors along the lower corridors to the lifts.

I remember the first time I came with Mum to see him after they’d moved him on to the ward. Mum led me through the corridors along that red line until we reached the lifts and we stepped inside this massive metal chamber and she pressed the button for Level 8, and I looked at the word on the sign on the wall and sounded it out in my head and I asked her, “What’s oncology?”

I know what it means now. Oncology is another word for cancer. That’s what they found in my dad’s spine when he went to see the doctor about the back pain he kept getting when he was milking the cows.

Even when I knew the word, I didn’t really know what it meant. Looking back now, I feel unbelievably stupid because I had actually found it fun making those family trips from Parnassus to Christchurch each week. Mum and I would drop Dad at the hospital and then we’d go for lunch in Container City – which is the part of town where they have made all the shops out of these big shipping containers. They did it as a temporary thing because all the buildings were destroyed in the earthquake seven years ago, but then it remained and I kind of like it the way it is now. There’s a really good noodle bar in Container City so usually we’d have noodles and mostly we’d get takeaway noodles for Dad too for later.

Things changed once he was on the ward and he didn’t get to go home. We’d still get him noodles but he never, ever wanted to eat them. He wasn’t hungry because of the medication he was on. Mum kept buying them anyway, even though he’d just leave them sitting there going cold beside his bed. By then the cancer had metastasised. That was another word I didn’t know. It meant it had spread, travelling from his spine to his liver and his brain. Me-tas-ta-sised – that word sucked all the air out of the room when they told Mum. She couldn’t look at me as we walked back to the car without Dad that day.

I remember how, when she unlocked the car, she kind of crumpled over for a minute and didn’t get in. I had this lump in my throat that wouldn’t go away, and when I opened my door and sat down in my seat for some reason it seemed like the right thing to do to shut my door not once but twice. Then I did the same to my seat belt, buckling and unbuckling, doing it up twice too – click-undo-click.

Looking back, I can’t tell you why, but from that moment on the way home from the hospital when I double-shut that car door, that was when it began. I did the same thing when I got out of the car at home. I shut the door and then opened it and shut it again. I thought Mum would ask me what I was doing, but she didn’t even notice. I guess she had other things on her mind. Anyway, from then on it wasn’t that I wanted to do it. I had to do it.

Mum didn’t notice at home either when I shut my bedroom door twice. In the morning she told me off because I’d left my bedroom light on all night and I said I’d fallen asleep but really it was because when I went to switch off the light, I had this urge for making things even, just like the car door, and I found it impossible to only press the switch once so I had to switch the lights back on again, and off and on again to make it even, and then the lights were still on and so I slept with the lights glowing and my head buried in Moxy’s fur.

Every time from then on, when I got in the car or entered my bedroom, I completed that double door slam and on the second swing as the lock clicked shut I felt this incredible release. It was like a rush to my brain, this surge of energy that felt solid and real, and in that perfect moment I knew that somehow my actions were making everyone that I loved – Dad and Mum and Gus and Jock and Moxy – safe.

Double-slam, double-slam. I didn’t realise that pretty soon the urge for release would become my prison. That when I tried to stop doing things twice it would throw me into an anxiety attack that made me feel like a swarm of bees was invading my brain, the buzzing inside my head making me want to scream and curl up in a ball and disappear forever.

As the rituals took hold of me over the coming months, I desperately wanted to tell Mum what was happening to me. I mean, I was so scared of my own mind, I really thought I was going crazy. But what if I was crazy? And what if Mum found out I was having all these weird thoughts and she stopped loving me? You know, they have mental hospitals where they lock up kids like me – I’ve seen it in movies.

The more I thought about telling Mum, the more afraid I got. And the more I double-slammed those doors.

I couldn’t tell Moana either, even though we were best friends at school. I told Moana once about how I’d wet the bed on school camp and she told Juanita Wanakore and she teased me about it all term. If I was going to tell someone, I had to know I could trust them to never tell another soul.

I remember when I told Gus, he just held me with his eyes. I sat on the five-bar gate and I stroked his neck as I spoke and I told him everything. I knew he was really listening because the whole time his ears swivelled back and forth and his dark, liquid brown eyes were soft and sad and sometimes he wrinkled his muzzle. And as we sat there together, I very carefully did two tiny braids into his mane at the base of his neck by the wither. And that was when I knew that Gus was a part of my OCD too, and that I needed to do these two braids to make sure that Gus was safe. They would protect him, and even Jock and Moxy too.

When I first got Gus, he came from a farm where he was in a big herd of horses. I thought maybe he’d miss having a herd, but when he came to live in Parnassus, it was like me and Jock and Moxy became his herd. With Gus and Jock, they have this real respectful relationship. Like, when we go for rides across the farm, Jock will always fall in at Gus’s heels and keep in time with his strides. Border collies are smart like that and Jock is super well-trained. He used to be a working dog until he got too old, and I can give him instructions and he does whatever I tell him.

Moxy is the wild one of the group – she always runs ahead, being our trailblazer, sniffing and scouting the way. She’s intrepid for a cat. It’s in her breeding. Cornish Rex are real explorers. If you don’t know what they look like, well, they are almost bald because they have this crinkled-up fur like they’ve been shaved and the skin stretches taut so you can see the bones of her skull through it and she’s super-skinny with a long, ropey tail like a rat. I’m not making her sound very beautiful and I guess she’s not, but she is kind of amazing-looking, like the sort of pet an Egyptian princess would own.

We paid almost a thousand dollars for Moxy, and Dad was furious when he found out because he said he could buy a good working dog for that and you can get kittens for free around here because people are always giving them away. You shouldn’t have to pay for them. But Mum said Cornish Rex weren’t like ordinary cats – they were explorers, more like dogs than cats in their way, and loyal like a dog is loyal, choosing just one master. Also she knew this lady in Christchurch who was a “cat fancier” who bred them and did us a cheap deal. She was a really odd woman – she kept her cats in cages and washed them in special shampoo and wouldn’t let you play with them and when you went round to her house it smelt of cat poo and all her furniture was covered in plastic.

Dad soon changed his mind about paying for a fancy cat once Moxy chalked up the highest kill rate of any ratter we’ve ever had. She’s an amazing huntress. And she eats the rats too. Lots of cats will eat mice but not rats because rats taste gross, I guess, but Moxy swallows them down – she crunches up everything except for the fangs at the front and the tail at the back.

Moxy is supposed to be my cat, but if she’s loyal to anyone it’s Gus. She thinks she belongs to him. Or maybe it’s the other way round and she thinks Gus is her horse. If I’m looking for her then I’ll find her out there in the paddock with him, curled up on top of his rump, purring contentedly.

Gus was the only one I told about my OCD for a long time. In fact, I never would have told Mum at all. I was going to keep it a secret forever. The problem was, the OCD got worse. It got so bad I began to lie about stuff. Like, I would pretend to be sick and just stay in bed all day because I figured if I didn’t move, if I did nothing at all, then I didn’t need to do any of my rituals and I wouldn’t have to try to fight the urges inside me.

Only Mum wouldn’t leave me alone. She kept insisting that if I wasn’t actually sick, I needed to go to school and do my chores. But the OCD made it impossible because I’d developed this complex world of chaos in my bedroom. It looked like a big mess, but it was all part of my plan and I’d lie in the middle of the floor like a statue with the lights as bright as heaven above, unable to switch them off and trying not to think as the bees made my head fuzzy.

One morning Mum came into my room. I’d had the lights on all night and when she left my door open and touched the light switch I started shouting. It all suddenly burst out of me like pus from a swollen wound.

“Mum!” I began sobbing. “There’s something wrong with me!”

It was Mum who looked up my symptoms on the internet and discovered I was OCD. The initials stand for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

“Evie,” she said, “it’s going to be OK. We’ll find someone who can help.”

That was what led us back to the hospital, following the blue line this time instead of the red. Once a week every Tuesday at four.

We come here, to these familiar corridors with their weird, tainted smell that is a mix of antiseptic and blood, and every time I catch sight of that sign in the lift that says “Level 8: Oncology” I feel the tears well up and I get so mad at myself, and I tell myself not to cry. I tell myself all sorts of things. And I count my footsteps. One-two. Even steps between each floor tile, an even number of buttons that must be pressed when I enter the lift, and two whole glasses of water from the cooler in the waiting room before I enter Willard Fox’s rooms to begin our session.

CHAPTER 3
The Minotaur

I still can’t believe Gus is gone. I stand beneath the bough of the tree where I tied him last night before I went to bed and then I walk round the tree again until I have done a full circle, as if this is some insane game of hide-and-seek.

I shove my torch under my armpit to free up my hands so I can untie the remaining length of rope that he left behind. When I touch the frayed ends where the rope has been broken off, it makes me feel sick. Poor Gus! He must have been terrified to rip it apart like that. It would have taken such force! He must have pulled back like mad when the quake struck. Terrified and alone, desperate to escape.

I work the rope free, prising it off with my shaky fingers, and all the while Jock stays with me and squashes so hard against my thigh I can feel his heart pounding through his bony ribcage. I lower my hand to his head and stroke his ears to soothe him with my own trembling fingers. He gazes up at me and gives this desperate whimper and we look each other in the eye and I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it too.

“It’s OK,” I say. “We’re in this together and we will find him.”

Anyway there’s no way we can make it to Kaikoura where the rescue boat will be waiting without him. And it won’t wait forever. Time is already running out. So we have to find him, and soon.

But I don’t even know where to start, here in the dark in this paddock somewhere between Hawkswood and Ferniehurst, the remotest hill country of the South Island coast. No people for miles, no houses, no lights.

I desperately want to go back into the tent and curl up in a ball and cling on to Moxy and stay in the tent with her and Jock. Then we could look for Gus when the dawn comes. But I can’t do that. I think of my pony out there on his own and I know he’s scared and he’s in trouble and I can’t abandon him to survive the night alone. Darkness or not, I’m going to find him.

One thing on my side is that Gus is a smart horse. Back at home in Parnassus, when I fetch him from the paddock, I don’t need to go far because I can call him to me. So even out here in the middle of nowhere, I know that if he can hear me, he’ll come to me.

And so I call him.

“Gus!” My voice breaks in the night air and it sounds so frail I hardly recognise it.

“Gus!” I try to be stronger this time. I need the sound to travel as far as it can for him to hear me.

I don’t keep shouting. I pause for a minute and wait to see if he will whinny back to me. That’s what he does back home. Gus is clever. He’s always known his name. He knew it even before me, from the very beginning …

***

“So you didn’t name him Gus?” Willard Fox asks me.

“No,” I say. “He was already called that when I got him. You never change a pony’s name. It’s bad luck.”

“And you’re superstitious about it, huh?”

I raise an eyebrow, as this seems like a dumb question. I am superstitious about everything.

“What sort of riding do you do with Gus?” Willard asks.

“He’s really good at cross-country,” I say. We’ve jumped one-star fences at home, which is really big for a 14.2 pony. I think he’s good enough to make Eventing Champs.

“His actual competition name isn’t Gus. It’s Pegasus. I just call him Gus for short.”

“Pegasus!” Willard Fox exclaims. “Nice. Like the horse in the Greek myth?”

“Well, Pegasus was white and Gus is kind of, well, he’s dapple-grey,” I say. “And so they’re the same except the Greek Pegasus had wings and he was born from the neck of the Medusa to be the carrier of thunderbolts for Zeus.”

Willard Fox looks impressed. “So you know your Greek gods?”

“We’re studying them at school.”

I thought Willard Fox would be different from this. A psychologist should have a white coat or a stethoscope or something. Willard Fox wears a plaid shirt and jeans and his hair sticks up all scruffy and he’s got this smile that takes up his whole face. He gives me one of his big grins when he says, “You must be really upset to be missing school,” but I don’t smile back.

“I’d rather be in school,” I say.

“Really?” He doesn’t look at all offended, he just shrugs it off. “OK, cool. So this whole psychologist thing is all your mum’s idea, huh?”

I don’t reply.

“So why don’t you want to be here, Evie?”

“Because,” I say, “I don’t even have OCD.”

Willard nods. “Fair enough,” he says. “Tell me, why are you so certain, Evie, that you don’t have OCD?”

I frown as I think about this. “Well, I don’t ever care if my hands are dirty.”

Willard nods thoughtfully. “So that means you can’t have OCD, right? Because people with OCD are clean freaks, right? They wash their hands all the time and they keep things totally neat. And they say things like, “Oh, I simply have to keep the kitchen spotless because I’m sooooo OCD!”

He waves his hands about theatrically as he says this and I can’t help laughing.

He sees me laugh and he smiles too and his goofy little-kid grin takes up his whole face again.

“Evie,” Willard Fox says, “it’s not about being a neat freak. There are lots of different ways to be OCD. So tell me about you. Let’s talk about what you do.”

Then there is this enormous vacuum in the room where I say nothing for ages and Willard Fox just sits there and he says nothing too. And he waits and waits and when I speak at last my voice is all trembly.

“I count things …”

***

I shine my torch into the darkness in every direction but I can’t see Gus and I am just thinking I should give up when Jock, who is still glued to my side, lets out this low growl.

“What is it?” I say.

Jock growls again, and this time it’s in the back of his throat, and the growl gets lower and lower until it becomes a bark.

Grr-woof, grr-woof!

I put my hand down to touch him and realise that the hackles have risen up on the back of his neck. Does he sense that Gus is near or is it something else? “What’s up, Jock?” I ask him.

The only time I’ve seen Jock act like this is when an aftershock is coming. And so I brace myself for the boom and the rumble beneath my feet, but then when it doesn’t come and he’s still growl-barking I know there is something out there. It must be Gus.

Jock tenses up. He wants to go, but I’m worried I’ll lose him too! I grab his collar to hang on to him and he strains against my hand as I take the rope that I pulled down from the tree and I tie it on to him.

A Border collie knows one hundred and sixty words. I remember Dad telling me that. I’ve always wondered how many words Jock really knows. I know he knows my name, and his. I’m pretty certain too that he knows “Gus”.

“Jock,” I hold his muzzle in my hands as I speak to him. “Go. Find. Gus.”

When I let go of him this time, I feel the rope go taut in my hand and he pulls me forward with a lurch. I stumble to keep up and I train my torch beam on to Jock’s back so I can follow him. I’m surrounded by darkness except for his blurry black and white form that moves ahead of me through the void.

The rye grass is long and damp from evening dew and I feel wetness seeping through above the top of my riding boots as I half walk, half jog to keep up with him.

I can feel the anxiety creeping up on me, making my pulse race. I hope the braids in Gus’s mane have held. I can’t do anything about them now, but there are other rituals I can do. I could stop again and arrange the contents of my backpack to squash the anxiety back down. But I push through the fear and keep going, even though my mind is racing with thoughts like What if we get lost? Then we’ll never find our way back and Moxy will end up trapped in the tent alone and she’ll be stuck in there forever and she’ll starve and die …

… and just as I’m running all the worst-case scenarios through my head and I’m about to lose it, Jock stops running. He freezes in front of me and the hackles on his neck stiffen straight up and he starts barking his head off. But when I shine the torchlight ahead of us, there’s nothing there!

What is he going on about?

“Gus?” I call out.

“Gus!”

I shift my torch to the left and there in the clean, white beam of light he stands facing us. His white face is dappled like the moon, dark eyes reflecting and unblinking.

If I had hackles like Jock, they would rise on the back of my neck too. Because the eyes captured in my torchlight are not the ones I expected. The fur is grey like Gus, but the face is broader and coarse, and gleaming above his temples there are two sleek, hard horns, lethal and as highly polished as sabres, curving and sharpening to a brutal point on either side.

Jock growls and the creature returns my dog’s warning with a threat of his own – a deep, indignant snort expelling streams of mucus from his nostrils.

This is not my horse. Not Pegasus at all, but the Minotaur. I am staring at the face of a great, white bull.

CHAPTER 4
The Sacrifices

The white bull stares back at me, his eyes boring down my torch beam. For a moment, we hold each other’s gaze. And then I run!

Almost immediately I know it’s the very worst thing I could possibly have done. Idiot! I curse myself for turning my back on him. But the fear is so deep and so primal, I’m not thinking, I’m just falling and getting up again and scrambling for my life, running through the deep grass and then tumbling forward, down on my hands and knees, panting and sobbing, as I try to escape.

I can hear Jock behind me and he’s barking his head off! He didn’t run after me. The herding dog blood is so strong in him, he’s instinctively turned to face the bull. I’ve seen him do it before. Once he dominated a whole stampeding dairy herd and turned them round by holding his ground. But a white Charolais is not the same as a Friesian cow, and even a working dog with Jock’s awesome skills can’t back him off for long. I hear my dog’s valiant woofs and in reply come the angered snorts of the bull. There’s silence, a stand-off of sorts, and then the ground shakes and I think aftershock. But it’s not an earthquake this time. It’s the lumbering gait of the bull.

I turn with my torch and see Jock, unbowed and unafraid, facing him down and barking like mad.

The bull stops for a moment, and I think maybe Jock has him. But then he lets out this bellow, and the noise is so strong and low and terrifying, it’s like a lion’s roar. And then there’s the thunder of hooves once more and with my wobbly torch trained on the bull I don’t entirely see, but I know that he’s got Jock!

I can hear him yelping!

“Jock!”

He keeps howling and I know he’s been hurt and without thinking I find myself running back to him. My heart is pounding, and all I care about now is Jock and reaching him before the bull can get him again.

I run through the dark, stumbling and falling and getting up again until at last I reach Jock’s side. I stand over him and spin round in a full circle looking for the bull, making myself dizzy following the torch beam, hyperventilating with fear. Where is he? Where did he go?

Then my torch casts a shadow and I catch a flicker of something white in the furthest reaches of the beam. It’s the bull! He’s about ten metres to the right of us, and he’s moving in our direction.

At my feet Jock gives a whimper as if he’s trying to say, “You run!”

I can’t run, though. Not without him. So I throw my torch to the ground and yank my sweatshirt over my head and for a second everything is black and I’m panting and blind, and then with a tug my sight returns and I snatch up the torch in my left hand, and with the sweatshirt in my right, I focus back on the bull.

The sweatshirt is blue, which I know is the wrong colour. It should be red, right? Like a matador’s cape. But I am hoping that waving it around will have the same effect.

“Hoi!” I call out to the Charolais. “Hey, Bully Bull!”

I hold my sweatshirt out as far away as I can from my body and I wiggle it.

The bull pulls up to a halt, he stamps a hoof. He’s looking at me.

“No!” I say. “Not me. See the sweatshirt? Look at the pretty sweatshirt!”

The bull prepares to charge. As he angles his massive forehead towards the ground, the horns rise up and I see their gleaming, bony tips and I realise far too late how ridiculous I am with my matador cape. The bull is ten times my size and the sweatshirt is like a postage stamp to him.

I fling the sweatshirt hopelessly in his direction and I throw myself to the ground on top of Jock. And as the hooves thunder I know that any moment I will feel the impact. I’ve seen bulls attack cattle dogs. I once saw one on the farm get gored by a horn and he had to be put down. And that’s what I’m thinking this bull will do to me, and I can feel Jock squashed beneath me and I think at least he will be safe because the bull will get me first.

And at that moment I am Theseus, facing the Minotaur.

***

I’m back in the hospital for my second session with Willard Fox. I’m telling him about the Ancient Greek day we had at school.

“I went as the goddess Athena,” I say.

We had to dress as gods so I wore an old bed sheet knotted at the shoulder, and when I got on the bus George the bus driver gave me a look and said, “Your mum forget to wash your clothes?”

Half the kids on the bus weren’t even in costume.

“Moana was just in shorts and a T-shirt!” I tell Willard Fox. I was grumpy with her that day because we had a fight about superpowers.

“I said my superpower would be to jump those really huge four-star cross-country courses like at the Badminton Horse Trials,” I tell Willard Fox. “But Moana said horse riding’s not a superpower, even though it totally is.”

“So that’s why you had a fight?”

I shake my head. “No, we had the fight after that.”

Moana said her superpower would be mind reading and to show me she put her hands on my head with her fingers splayed at my temples. And that was when I panicked and pulled her hands off me because if Moana could read my mind then we wouldn’t be best friends any more. She would think I was a freak because of my OCD.

“So Moana doesn’t know you have OCD?” Willard Fox asks.

“No,” I say.

No one at school knows. Especially not Mrs Lowry, and sometimes it’s hard because she picks on me because I can’t write certain letters – like M and N. And so my spelling is bad.

At the Ancient Greek day, Mrs Lowry got Brodie to do the sacrifice to Zeus – because he’s her pet and he gets to do everything. But I am doing sacrifices too, every day and no one cares.

The counting and the rituals … even my bedroom. Mum thinks it’s a “god-awful mess” but really it’s my gift to the gods, a complex matrix of talismans and portents disguised as dirty clothes and old bowls of half-eaten cereal. And, then there’s my backpack, the most precious piece of my OCD universe. And those two braids in Gus’s mane. I must do them. I have to get them just right. If I don’t manage to ace it all – then I unleash hell.

“Evie, what if I told you that this is all the OCD? And it is tricking your brain. What if I told you that even though it seems real, your rituals don’t have the power to protect people?”

Willard Fox leans forward. “You’re doing this because you really love your animals, don’t you, Evie?”

I nod. “Of course I do! More than anything.”

“Well, what would you do if Gus got really sick?”

I feel my pulse quicken. I don’t like to imagine bad things happening to Gus.

“I’m protecting him,” I say abruptly. “He’s not sick.”

“Yes, but accidents happen, right?” Willard says. “So let’s say Gus gets hurt in the paddock. He cuts his leg. How would you fix it, Evie? Would you use your powers and do the braids in his mane? Pack things in and out of your backpack? Or …”

Willard Fox looks at me. “Or … would you maybe call the vet?”

I feel my cheeks turn hot. When he puts it that way I know that it is illogical, what I am doing.

“I’d call the vet.”

Willard looks at the backpack that I have beside me at my feet.

The force of my panic surprises me.

“Don’t touch it!”

“It’s OK …” Willard Fox says. “I know it’s precious. How about you show me?”

My hands are shaking as I pick up the backpack and put it on the table.

It sits there between me and Willard, like an unexploded bomb.

“Now what?” he says.

“I have to do the zips,” I say. “I do them twice. Before I take the things out.”

“OK,” Willard says. “So that’s the OCD talking. And today, we’re not going to give in to it. Today, instead of doing it twice, Evie, I want you to just unzip the zip and close it again once and then leave it. Can you do that?”

I reach out my hand, slowly, and when my fingers touch the zipper the bitter rush of pure adrenalin makes me want to be sick. Just the once? That’s so dangerous!

I close my eyes and I take a deep breath and I do it! I unzip the front pocket. Just once. It’s sitting there gaping open – taunting me! Then I zip it shut again. Just the once! It’s so wrong. I can feel the bees surging in my brain, imploring me to do it again, to make things even!”

“You’re doing great, Evie,” Willard Fox says.

Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod!! I hold my hand there, wanting to unzip-zip it a second time, tantalisingly close to giving in to the urge to do it again. It takes every bit of my willpower to fight it and all the time I can hear Willard’s voice talking me down, but it sounds fuzzy through the buzz of the bees in my brain.

“On a scale of one to ten,” he is saying, “where are you now Evie?”

“… eight,” I pant out the word. “I can’t breathe!”

I want to make the world safe!

“Evie,” Willard Fox says my name like he’s invoking a god. “You. Can. Do. This! I want you to say out loud with me: ‘I’m in charge, OCD. I’m taking the reins!”

I look at him and I feel a lump in my throat that blocks the words.

“Come on, Evie!” Willard says. “You don’t want to be controlled like this so do something about it. You need to fight it. Do it!”

And there, in the middle of his office, I hear his voice and then I hear another voice and it’s mine but it doesn’t sound like me. I’m screaming. “I’m in charge, OCD. I’m taking the reins!”

When I finish shouting the words, I burst into tears. Great big gasping sobs, and Willard is right there with me, telling me it will be OK and to take breaths, big deep breaths.

“Good work, Evie,” he says to me. “I’ll see you next week.”

***

Fear is not static – it is a living thing. Like the earth beneath my feet, constantly moving and changing. It sounds crazy, but looking back, at that moment in Willard’s rooms the zip on my backpack was just as terrifying to me as this half-a-tonne of Charolais bull in front of me is.

In the beam of my torch, the bull is bearing down on me. I know what’s coming and I’m about to close my eyes and brace myself for the death blow, the sharp stab of the lethal point of the horn into my gut. But the impact doesn’t come.

Thunder rolls through the ground once more and I look up and see a pale shadow appear from the darkness, galloping its way towards us and coming between me and Jock and the bull. In my torch beam, the grey dapples bleach away so that the horse looks almost white and the tail that unfurls behind him is flecked with stars. He looks like a creature from a Greek myth himself, like Pegasus. But he’s totally real, and my heart soars.

It’s my pony. It is Gus.

CHAPTER 5
Pegasus and Athena

Gus charges in at a gallop, and he pulls to a halt right between me and the Charolais. I see his eyes, dark and burning, as he squares off against the bull, and I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up at the heat of the desert blood in him. Gus taunts the Charolais, flashing back and forth in front of him in a high-stepping trot, then circling around, keeping just far enough away so that the bull cannot reach him. I keep my torch trained on them and its beam becomes the spotlight illuminating a grand performance as Gus dances rings around the Charolais. The dance is deadly, but there’s such grace and beauty to it. He spins and arches his neck, hocks driving beneath him so that one moment he almost seems to trot on the spot and the next he’s flying forward, his mane whipping in the vortex created by his acceleration. I have never seen him look more Arabian than he does at this moment.

Compared to the fluid beauty of my horse’s movement, the Charolais looks like an old, punch-drunk prizefighter who’s been beaten too many times in the ring. He’s a lumbering oaf, slow and witless. He staggers around, bewildered by Gus’s display, and then, shaking his enormous head as if he’s been dazed and suddenly woken up, he gives a snort and charges. He is too slow. Gus is already gone, and the bull misses completely and now Gus loops behind him and circles round and round, still just out of reach in his high-striding trot, and then as he dashes past once more he shoots off, moving purposefully away from me and Jock so that the bull gives chase. They disappear into the darkness and that’s when I know we have our chance to get to safety. I grab Jock by the collar and we run.

Jock is on his feet and he’s matching my stride. I still don’t know how badly he’s injured from the bull’s strike but despite his wounds he can move well enough. He bounds on in front of me, leading the way, and my torch beam is wobbling so that the world seems to fling about in front of my eyes but I keep running. Then up ahead of us I can see the tree where I tied Gus last night and I know we have somehow found our way back to camp.

My fingers fumble to unzip the tent. I can hear Moxy yowling her distress inside. I scoop her up in my arms, and she does this thing she does when she is really, really pleased to see me where she bites my face. And then she even smooches all over Jock, which is unusual because she’s mostly a bit stand-offish with him and not all cuddly like she is with Gus. I see her sniff at Jock’s side, examining him, and he whimpers and begins licking the spot with his tongue and I can see now where the bull got him. There’s a cut on his flank where he got nicked by the tip of the horn. Even though there’s blood, the wound is shallow. If I was a vet I don’t think I’d even do stitches, and Jock is licking it clean so he will be OK.

Jock and I lie there beside each other, both of us panting, exhausted from running all the way back, Moxy purring all around us. I shine the torch on my watch and see that it’s four am. I want to get out and search for Gus again but it would be better to wait until it’s light. At least I know he’s close now and we can find him when the dawn comes, but I’m not going back into the dark with the bull still out there. Gus can outrun him, I’m certain of that. But we’re not as quick. And so we lie there and when I get my breath back, I pick up my backpack and I zip and unzip it again. I do my rituals, until my heart is beating at the regular pace once more.

Not all rituals are bad. Mum used to say it was “our ritual”, whenever we went to see Willard Fox, to stop off on the way back in Parnassus at the dairy to get an ice cream.

If my friend Gemma was working, I’d always get a single cone of vanilla because Gemma does big scoops. But if Scary Mary was behind the counter then I’d have to go for a Choc Bomb because Scary Mary’s scoops are too stingy.

Scary Mary owns the Parnassus Dairy. She doesn’t let you browse the Horse & Pony either. She has a grumpy handwritten sign up over the magazine section that says: “Please purchase before you read. This is not a Library.”

Anyway, I’m in my tent doing my ritual with the backpack, and I’m thinking about Willard Fox and the very last time I saw him. We were rating all the things that give me OCD on a scale of one to ten, and then Willard Fox came to my backpack.

“On a scale of one to ten,” Willard Fox asks me, “where would you put the backpack, Evie?”

The backpack is my portable OCD world. You could take the sum of all my fears and shove them together and they would fit neatly inside that backpack. I look at Willard Fox. “A ten.”

“Evie,” Willard says, “I feel like we’ve been here together in the foothills for a long time now and you’ve done all this stuff in preparation, and now you’re ready. It’s time to go up Mount Everest.”

I know what he wants and it makes the bees in my brain start humming.

I mutter something about how I’ve done enough. My OCD is much better now, and maybe I don’t even need to come and see him any more, but Willard Fox still wants to look inside my backpack.

“What’s in there?” he asks me.

“It’s personal,” I say.

Willard Fox leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “Do you know what rust is, Evie?”

“Like on a car?” I say.

Willard Fox nods. “The thing about rust is, if you remove it, you have to get rid of all of it because if there’s still a little bit of it left then it grows back again.”

He looks at me. “OCD is like rust. We need to get it all out …”

“Or the OCD will come back again …” I finish his sentence.

I clutch the backpack to me. “If I let you look inside,” I say, “it will ruin it.”

Willard Fox nods. “Do you want to tell me then?”

I take a deep breath. “There’s a pen,” I say, “and a takeaway container, and a pair of glasses and a notebook.”

“And why these four things?” Willard Fox asks.

“Because I like even numbers.”

“Why else, Evie?”

There’s a pause in the room and you can hear the clock. I listen to it ticking. Willard Fox is good at silence, though, and he holds on and he waits for me.

“They were on my dad’s beside table,” I say. “In the hospital. When I did it.”

“When you did what, Evie?” Willard Fox says.

I don’t answer.

“Evie, do you think you made something bad happen?”

I am shaking. I look down at my hands and see that they’re bound in a tight knot. This was why I never wanted to come here! I knew it would come to this eventually. Willard Fox is too smart for me. I knew he would find out what I’ve done.

“Yes … no … maybe.”

“Well, that covers all the bases,” Willard Fox says.

I haven’t admitted this before, not to Mum or even to Gus. But with Willard the words just come out before I realise I’ve said them.

“That day when we visited Dad,” I say, “I … I was trying to stop having the OCD and I … I made myself do it.”

“What did you do? What do you mean, Evie?”

“I didn’t know it would happen! I was trying to be good.”

There is no air in the room and the dust motes float and I am not in my body any more. And I can hear my voice but it sounds like it isn’t mine as I tell Willard Fox what I did.

“I came home and I got out of the car and only slammed it once. And that was when it happened.”

I’m in tears now, and I can barely sob the words out.

“That was the day he died.”

“Evie? Do you really think your dad died because you didn’t slam a car door twice?”

He’s not being funny right now and his smile, for once, is gone.

“Yes,” I say softly.

Willard Fox leans forward and makes a steeple with his fingertips. “You know, if this was Ancient Greece, we could have blamed the gods for your dad, right? Maybe your sacrifice to Zeus wasn’t quite right. Or maybe you angered one of the other gods, like Hera, maybe?”

I nod, my eyes misting with tears.

“Things were a lot easier, I think,” Willard Fox says, “when we had gods to shoulder the responsibility for our fates. Because without gods, how do we explain famine and disease and war? Or the death of someone we love. Without gods, there is no reason. All we have is the randomness of life. So why does fate make our car tyre go flat, or make our horse go lame just before a big competition, or give us the cancer that kills us?

Willard Fox hands me a tissue and I blow my nose.

“Evie, your OCD wants you to believe that you can slam a car door twice and change the course of the future, that you are the mastermind of this universe, that your rituals will bring order. But they won’t. So here’s the deal. You have to accept that the world is beyond your control. Stop making sacrifices to fake gods and take back your real power.”

He smiles at me. “Can you do it?”

I sniffle a little and then I look him square in the eye and I say it: “I’m in charge, OCD. I’m taking the reins.”

And this time, I really, really mean it.

***

“Are you ready, Evie?”

It’s the weekend after my last session with Willard Fox and I’m in the best place in the whole world. At the start line of a cross-country course.

Mum is standing beside me with Gus in his full tack. He has a martingale on him, and his new cross-country tendon boots. I pull on my gloves and tighten the chinstrap on my helmet, and then Mum gives me a leg up. I feel a rush run through me as I land lightly in the saddle and slip my feet into the irons.

My OCD has been bad this morning. As I was tacking up, I could hear the bees ready to swarm and at the last minute I caved in to them and hastily put two tiny braids into Gus’s mane after all. No big deal. Just to be safe. To be safe. Now, as they’re calling out my number, 23, I get another twinge of OCD. I look down at my bib and wish it was an even number. Even would be safer. Even would be good.

“Two riders to go ahead of you …” Mum looks at number 21 who’s at the start box and about to be given the signal to set off on the course. “You can head down there now …”

She smiles and gives Gus a slappy pat on his shoulder. “Remember to slow down into the woods to take the roll top,” she says. “You need to give his eyes a chance to adjust to the light in there. Evie, remember at the ditch, look up! Never, ever look down or he’ll stop. Your eyes will take you where you want to go …”

At the warm-up area beside the start box I take a tight hold on Gus and look out over the fences and trace my battle plan in my mind. Mum and I have already walked the course twice this morning. There are sixteen jumps and it seemed to me that her advice for each fence was usually exactly the same. “Sit up, keep straight and kick on!”

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