It was the kind of game you only ever heard of at sleepovers or around the fading embers of a late night campfire. In fact I was nine when I heard it, attending an overnight for the church's youth group and already wanting it to all be over before our dinner prayers.
As with all church groups of its time, we were split by genders and sent to our sleeping bags on opposite sides of the church. By the time we got settled on our side the older girls were several ghost stories deep and eagerly soaking up a sea of frightened faces all around them.
If it had stayed so innocent we wouldn't have spent the rest of the night in the freezing cold while police and ambulance crews tore the place apart for tiny bodies they would never find. But instead we listened when one girl told us we could send someone into the future by chanting and dancing.
It just seemed so silly at the time, seemed just like the skipping rope songs we all knew off by heart but the more of us copied her chanting, the more times the volunteered girl span and crouched... the deeper into the rhythm we were drawn and she was drawn far, far away.
The group leaders came rushing in when we regained enough breath to scream in fear at the hands that had grabbed her and pulled her through the worn carpet. None of them believed our half-garbled, half-wept out explanations and assumed someone had taken her.
It was only supposed to be a game but some of us may have said the words wrong. I may have said a few words wrong and to this day, some thirty years later, none of us have seen her. The girl who originally suggested it is still trying to figure out where it went wrong and where she was sent.
I don't reckon she'll ever be found - I don't reckon she went backwards or forwards in time.
I know what I saw though, and I saw clawed hands dragging her down.
I know she's waiting for us down there.
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