Safe Journey Bridge: A Step Beyond (Safe Journey Bridge: The Aftermath Book 2)

Safe Journey Bridge spans an ancient bog that occasionally spews up the shrunken skulls of its unfortunate victims. Teenagers, Jemma, Hannah, Stiggy and Jake, fall out over ownership of the skull of Dolbey Ghillean, a young aristocrat who committed suicide in the bog after being crossed in love on his return from the Napoleonic wars. The overarching presence of Castle Ghillean and the bog's macabre history provide the backdrop to teenage rivalries, sexual awakening, social jealousies and political intrigues as Jemma and her friends come of age.
When Colin Corning breaks his back and spends a year in hospital researching the Safe Journey's sinister past, the school friends' adolescent misreading of the adult world deepens obsessively, conspiratorially interweaving the artifice of local gossip and politics (directed by Alderman Jeffries and Angela Ryland-Smythe) into a narrowing sphere of disenchantment and misunderstanding dominated by the lure of Safe Journey Bridge and the bog.
As the bog's victims pile up, the shifting sands of adolescent certainties and beliefs change constantly. The truth, they realise, is simply an adult construction that never quite lives up to its promise. The bog, seething and shrouded in mist, is always there. It is real. Safe Journey Bridge is real. Just a step beyond.