Terrifying Love: A Halloween Anthology

by Serena Nova

  “I know, it’s going to be okay. I wish it didn’t have to be you, but he really didn’t give us much choice. He came here to kill you. Keep that in mind. It was us or him, and the police agree. He had killed people before, or had people killed. After all, Matthew was not acting alone but following his lead,” Taj quietly finished and moved closer to hold her.

  They did not go to work that day, or the next. Anna needed time to process everything and calm down. And honestly, she did not think she could ever go back and face her colleagues. By now, they would all know what she did, and she could not deal with the judgemental looks and unfriendly atmosphere. She did not have the strength to deal with it.

  Fortunately, she didn’t have to anymore.

  Anna looked at Taj and said quietly, “I have a confession to make…”

  Epilogue

  Months had passed since that terrifying night when Anna nearly lost everything. She still hadn’t made peace with her actions, but she was getting there. Grateful she was still alive. Even more grateful Taj was still with her. She could not regret her actions when she looked at Taj’s smiling face. Taj was here, thanks to her and what she did to save her. And that smile… She will never get tired of that beautiful smile and that mesmerising teeth gap. Or those deep dark eyes, Anna often found herself drowning in. Yes, she had definitely met the love of her life and she was here and alive, and therefore Anna knew she would get over whatever was still weighing her down.

  They ran away to Portugal the moment their names were cleared, and the investigation closed. Looking over their shoulders was not how they imagined the rest of their lives to be. So, running was not really what they did, but Anna liked to think of it that way because it sounded more romantic like that in her head. What they actually did was pack up and leave quietly. They still kept Taj’s parents’ house and paid someone to take care of it. Anna sold her apartment below market value just to get rid of it. She never wanted to step foot inside it again. So, the moment she could function, they went to Taj’s house and stayed there until they left. Taj made all the arrangements and moved all her stuff, and Anna was forever grateful for that.

  What she did that last day, she knew was criminal. She also knew she would never get caught. They had no way of tracing it back to her, and she justified it because the money would have never been returned to the rightful owners anyway. Not only that, but the bank had reimbursed those they could find, as it was one of their employees that had been stealing the entire time.

  Anna was fed up with all the intrigue and fearing for their lives. The uncertainty of what was going to happen and the obstacles they had to face. So, she used the stolen money to buy their freedom and happiness. The money would have never been returned to the people it was stolen from anyway. She liked to refer to it as bloody money, because so many people had died because of it. Hell, she nearly died because of it, three times, and Taj almost died. And that’s why her hands were covered in blood. So, she felt like she had earned the right to a part of it, and she took it. She transferred it into some hidden accounts and set them both for life.

  They chose Portugal because Taj used to talk about wanting to retire there and live on the beach. So, they bought a charming little house on the beach. Taj helped the local police here and there just to maintain her skills, and Anna did a bit of accounting for some of the local businesses, just to keep her mind busy. Other than that, they led a simple uncomplicated life, and they were happy.

  They sat every evening on the beach and watched the sun set with a glass of wine. But this evening, Anna looked at Taj, whose face was reflecting all the love she felt, and couldn’t stop herself from saying, “I’m so glad I met you.”

  About Annelie Janssen

  Annelie Janssen is a Dutch author of thriller, romance, contemporary and fantasy stories. Whatever story she loses herself in for her readers, she wants to bring them a whole new adventure that they won’t forget. Coming from a background as dancer turned law firm associate when she hurt her knee, she has a wide variety of interests that she is able to convey beautifully to her readers. When she is not writing she enjoys spending time with her husband and cat Fluffy, though not necessarily in that order, dancing like there’s no tomorrow, and spreading her love for books to the world.

  THE SPADE AND THE PATIO

  by Ada Rossi

  A tear escapes my eye

  Shattering the illusion that all is well

  No matter how the crystal ball lights up

  Or how many tarot cards are turned

  The truth is there for all to see

  Death has come calling

  Waiting patiently besides the bed

  A soothing presence

  That promises the pain will soon be over

  And peace is to be had in her hands

  By Helle Gade

  Chapter One - The Interviewer

  I sit, still and quiet at the table, watching Rebecca as she avoids looking at me. She is staring at the empty coffee mug, her fingers tracing the faded geometric pattern on the side. She doesn’t dare lift her eyes to meet mine. I’ll need to solve that. She’ll be feeling a mix of fear and shame, but that is unavoidable at this stage. They all do. But it’ll soon pass. I’ll make it pass. I open the cassette tapes and the sound leads Rebecca to look up at me.

  ”I haven’t seen an audio cassette for years” she said, still rather hesitant. ”I didn’t realise they still made them.“ She watches as I place them, one after the other, into the black, double deck tape machine on my right-hand side of the table. I click both closed slowly, savouring the sound of the catch engaging. Rebecca startles slightly, before her eyes drop back down to the mug. But she has given me the opening I needed to reassure her.

  ”You don’t need to worry, you know, just say what happened.“ I give her my most wholesome smile. I know the effect this will have on Rebecca, sending a rush of warmth through her soul, filling her heart with light. With love. I send love to Rebecca to build her strength, to install the confidence she is going to need to be able to succeed. ”I know you don’t think I’ll believe you. That no one who wasn’t there will believe you. Maybe even you don’t believe it yet yourself. But there is no going back, you can only come forward, and that means telling your full story to me, now.”

  Rebecca draws a deep breath, raising her face to look directly at me, her hazel eyes sparkling with her unshed tears. ”Okay then, I’ll tell you everything. Just once though.” She grips hold of the mug as if to drink from it, showing the broken nails of her right hand, still splintered and ragged, with the darkness of the soil buried deep under the nail to the quick. I take a deep breath and breathe more love towards her. ”And remember, as soon as you’ve told me what happened, we’ll be able to move you on and out of here.” I say to Rebecca as I reset the timer on the tape machine. ”You don’t need to go back there, you know, just say what you need to say, and I will see you safely through to the other side.“

  I clasp hold of her hand, squeezing it tightly, passing warmth to her blood as it circulates around her fingers, encapsulated in mine. ”Are you ready, Rebecca?”

  ”Sure,” she replies, now stronger in tone, more confident in her appearance. Filled with love for me, and eager to impress.

  ”Excellent,” I am cut off by the loud screeching of the audio tapes beginning to wind around. The old ways are by far the best. Rebecca jumps at the screech, her heart racing. I know, I could feel it beating as if it were mine. I begin to read Rebecca her rights. ”This interview is being tape recorded, you do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention…”

  Rebecca’s eyes drift around the room as I read out my introduction to the interview. I know the screech reminds her of the sound of the spade against the patio – it is, of course, designed to do so, to take her back to that moment before she began.

  ”Rebecca, tell me what happened last night.”

  ”It all began when you pulled my car over…”

 
Chapter Two - Rebecca

  My car is old. It’s not quite as old as I am but it’s running me a close second, like a younger sibling who is forever asking you for money and then letting you down when you need her most. But it hadn’t broken down that night, it had chugged along very happily all evening. Keith and I were driving home from dinner at a pub across town, famed for its fish and chips. The fish and chips had been gorgeous by the way. As usual, I was the designated driver for the evening. Keith was already four pints down, and I could tell he was itching to get home and start on the top shelf. It is sad, but he had been far more interested in the top shelf than in me for many months by this point.

  But I loved my car, vintage I would call it, rather than old. Two-seater soft top, a classic sports car that drove like a go-kart. Fun, and breathtakingly wild in the sunshine. It did however have a tendency for its lights to lose their connections, meaning there was far too often no brake light, or no indicator working. I assumed that this was why the police car was stopping me.

  It drove behind me at first. The police car filled my rear-view mirror, and it was hard to concentrate on what was coming up ahead rather than coming from behind. I instantly felt guilty, though about what, I could not be sure. Just generalised guilt accompanied by some serious anxiety. My heart was certainly beating harder than usual. The police car followed me for a few minutes, and I started to think it wasn’t me they were after, maybe they were just going the same way I was. Then the lights went on, and the siren sounded. I had been expecting it to do so, but it still made me jump.

  I pulled into the side of the road, and the police car stopped just behind me. I watched in the side mirror as an officer stepped out of the driver’s seat. I remember thinking how tall she was, and how her blonde hair shone, even in the semi-darkness, like a solar lamp that had soaked up that day’s sunshine and was now radiating it back out. Looking at her in the side mirror, slightly distorted, it was almost as if she had a halo.

  It was you. You could have had a halo, your light was shining brightly enough.

  I stepped out and joined you between our two cars. Keith stayed quiet in the passenger seat, and as far as I was concerned, he was no longer there. His omnipresent weight was no longer upon my shoulders. I could breathe a little more easily as my panic subsided, and I felt myself being drawn to you. Whether you represented safety or security, or simply warmth, I could not tell, but I wanted to be as close to you as I could manage.

  You smiled and asked, ”Is this your car?“ not unkindly, but more formally than I’d expected, given how intimate this moment was already feeling to me. How could I suddenly know that I’d been waiting for you all this time, and yet you don’t even know about my well-loved wreck of a motor vehicle? I could only nod though my confusion, and as you turned away from me and towards the rear of the car – yes, it was a taillight that was out – I realised I was staring, unable to take my gaze away from you. From the back of your head, with its long, elegant neck, and its golden halo.

  I was still nodding as you let me off. ”You need to fix this light as soon as possible,“ you said, still formal and correct but as you turned back towards me, I felt a tremor run through my body, slowly, intensely, from the bottom to the top, as your eyes appeared to caress mine. “You can’t be driving around without your taillights,” you added, though I barely heard you.

  And just like that, you turned and returned to your car, leaving me standing by the side of the road, idle and trembling. You took with you that sense of being seen, that you saw straight through my eyes and into my soul, as if I were open, fully spread wide and without any defence against you. I felt too warm, pink-cheeked and glowing, as if I’d been slightly sun-burned by your brightness. Tingly, shaky, but with my heart filled with hope. I had not imagined being able to feel hopeful again.

  I returned to the car slowly, pausing with one hand on the roof as I watched your car turn around and head back towards town. Keith only grunted in my direction as I sat back down, and I had to try twice to start the car, unsettled as I was. As the reflection of your lights in my mirror winked out, I knew something had been started that couldn’t be stopped, or slowed, only seen through to its conclusion. I just didn’t realise how quickly that was going to happen.

  Returning home a short time later, I sat heavily on the sofa, barely registering its soft give as I sunk into my seat. I switched the tv on without conscious effort – it defaulted to the news channel and I left it playing. Twenty-four hour rolling news is, effectively, the background music to my life. I suppose some may find it depressing, but I had a need to know what was happening before I could relax and accept all was good with my world, it made me feel fortunate somehow. Or at least it usually did, but tonight, I wasn’t paying it any attention at all.

  Keith was pouring drinks in the kitchen, I could hear the ice being popped out of the ice cube tray, and the tickle of a stirrer in a glass. Vodka tonic, a staple of ours, one large drink each, but his stronger than mine, always stronger. Mind you, neither would have been pub measures, our home measures have taken on an expansion of their own over time, meaning that these days, almost half of my glass is vodka. I’m sure Keith has tipped over, his drinks must be more spirit than tonic.

  As he brought our drinks over to me, I looked at him as if through a fresh lens, suddenly seeing him properly, seeing him clearly for the first time in what may have been years. He hadn’t bothered to shave that morning, and now his chin was covered in dark coarseness, adding to the sense of delinquency about him. His hair had grown beyond his usual time for a haircut, curling over the tops of his ears. His breath smelled of stale cigarettes, the roll ups he refused to countenance life without. Suddenly, I felt my heart sink as I finally acknowledged that for all the years we had been together, I no longer cared for him. Perhaps I had stopped loving him many years ago, but I was now dumb-struck by my total disinterest in him, in whether he was awake or not, whether he was happy or not, whether he breathed or not. He no longer had any claim on my attention, and I could picture a future beyond him.

  I had seen the light. I had seen your light.

  He mumbled something at me as he took his seat on the sofa, sinking slightly lower than me as his bulk filled his spot. He placed his glass on the low table beside him – already half empty. I took mine from him with a murmur of thanks, and turned my head back towards the TV, feigning interest in the latest political drama. But my mind was fully elsewhere.

  What was it about this woman that had caused me such a stroke of hope? Only when the heart is lifted, is it possible to see how entrenched in the mire it had been before, how deep it had sunk. The darkness that had slowly seeped into my life was still present, it was there as the dark clouds around the edge of my heart, more visible to me once they have parted to allow the sun to shine through. The sun makes the clouds seem denser, even heavier than they had appeared before. But now, the sun shone straight through my heart, like a sunbeam aimed by you, directly at the very centre of me. Though there was no rainbow yet, as far as I could tell. As soon as the thought occurred to me, I knew I wanted the rainbow in my life, and I wanted to create it with you.

  Keith bumped me slightly as he re-arranged himself, spreading his legs wider to accommodate… well, to accommodate his penis, I suppose. I shrunk smaller somehow, taking up less of the sofa as he expanded across it. I swallowed half my drink in one go, spluttering slightly at the realisation it was half vodka, and the tonic was flat. At least I didn’t swallow an ice cube, they were still large and floating well, nudging against my lips as the glass balanced there. I stood up, and as I did so, Keith handed me his empty glass with what appeared to be a grunt of a request for a refill. But then, that was our normal pattern.

  I took both our glasses through into our narrow kitchen. Pausing at the sink, my mind focused inwards to pry into the clouds once more, to see if this time I could help the sunbeam expand into them. The clouds pushed back against me slightly, but they didn’t make it back to their origina
l place and with some effort, I grew the light space within my heart. I smiled, I had learned that, with some effort, my clouds could be pushed back. Still smiling, I emptied the reminder of my drink down the sink, and refilled it with water. I may have finished for the night, but I poured another vodka for Keith. I’m sure it would take much more than an angel shining sunbeams into his soul before he would reduce his pre-bed vodka intake, and I was not about to test my theory.

  As I glanced up, the walls seemed to take a step inwards. This bothered me far more than the sudden emergence of a weather system in my mind’s eye, as my belly tightened, and I felt bile in my throat. Drinking the water down eased it somehow, but the walls didn’t move back into place. The room felt smaller, the air heavier, yet somehow less still, and it whirled around me as I turned from the sink to head back towards the living room. My feet were a little further away from me than they should be, as if my legs had been slightly stretched, and I felt vaguely dizzy when I tried to look at them and pull myself back into some sort of sense of who I was, where I was and what I was doing. I tried to focus, but I was distracted by a noise outside, a scuffling by the back door. I moved slowly across to the door, across what now seemed no distance at all. Turning the key, I cracked the door open to look through the smallest of gaps, feeling my fear rising as to what would be waiting for me outside, and how much more unsettling this evening could become.

  It was bright enough outside for there to be a security light shining into the back garden, though ours had broken months ago, and had remained on our never-ending list of things to do. It took a moment or two before I realised what the light was, to accept it by opening the door fully, to allow it to wholly penetrate me. I basked in its warmth, now able to see that you stood there. You. Still in your full uniform, your body armour dark against the light that pulsed from inside you, clearly visible to me now that your light shone this brightly. I absorbed you into my bones, like a lizard soaks the heat from the sun’s rays. Struck dumb, I could do nothing but stare at you. Words failed me yet again, and yet again, words did not seem necessary.