Dear Amy

by Helen Callaghan

  I followed the cord to see if it was plugged in – maybe I’d pulled the plastic out of its socket – but it was connected, all right. I wiggled the plug in the socket, to see if this made any difference. Still nothing. I replaced the handset, then went into the hall to try the phone there. It, too, was dead. I suppose I’d known all along that it would be.

  I stood in the darkened hall, trying to shake off my sick, frightened feeling. The mobile. Where the hell was my mobile? Oh yes, I remembered now. I had switched it off and thrown it contemptuously on to the back seat of the car when Lily had tried to call me on the drive home. Not that my mobile would do me much good here – there was hardly any signal out at this end of the village.

  I listened intently, but there was nothing but the faint creak of the house settling about me, the tiniest rustle of dead leaves in the cold still autumn outside. Perhaps the phone was nothing, some glitch with the cable company – or perhaps, whoever they were, they were waiting for me outside, waiting for me to realize the line was dead, and to panic and run out into their grasp.

  Why on Earth had I come back to the house?

  You know, maybe Lily has a point. Maybe I am insane.

  I lifted the phone again, but it was still dead.

  That draught, that draught in the kitchen when I’d filled the kettle – where had that been coming from?

  ‘What now?’ I whispered.

  I had to get out of here. I had to get my mobile.

  I retreated back into the kitchen, the dizzying vertigo of unreality making me feel as light as air, horribly conscious of how the window framed me by the lamplight, displaying me to anyone who might be watching from the night-shrouded garden. There was a steak knife lying in the sink, slightly greasy from the cooking I’d been doing yesterday. My knuckles whitened around the black plastic grip.

  ‘Calm down,’ I whispered to myself, but the knife shook anyway.

  Now I was back in the kitchen the idea of leaving it appalled me. The rest of the house was silent and unlit – the only sound was the hum of the refrigerator, constantly startling me.

  I moved to switch the kitchen fluorescents on, to chase the darkness infesting the house back outdoors and into the night, but found I didn’t dare. My hand covered the switch. It was sweating on to the cold white plastic, leaving salty smears.

  There was a sudden sound, a momentarily unidentifiable change. I leapt away from the wall and raised the knife – I didn’t think about it, some part of my reptile brain must have done it for me – then realized it was only the fridge motor winding down.

  I remembered to breathe again. It was like the first breath I ever took; air flooded my parched lungs. I sighed in relative relief.

  Then the table lamp flickered uncertainly.

  Surely the bulb couldn’t be going now. Not now, for God’s sake . . . Gripping the knife, I resolved to hit the switch for the fluorescents. I would not be left in total darkness. I would not . . .

  The table lamp winked out, and the room vanished.

  I think I screamed, if you could call it that. It was a dry, choking noise, a high-pitched cawing, like a crow’s. I’d thrown myself back against the kitchen wall, and now the chilly plaster ground against my shoulders.

  My hand snaked out frantically for the light switch, but it had disappeared in the darkness. My fingers slid over the paint, making whispering noises as they brushed against it. Then one finger caught on the tip of the fixture. I jabbed hard at the flat switch, which clicked several times, uselessly.

  I slid down the wall a few inches, sagging with terror and despair.

  I don’t like the dark at the best of times. A little of the streetlight and the vicarious lights of other houses, shuttered in warmth and safety, lightly limned the larger objects in the kitchen, or it may have been my eyes adjusting to the dark.

  You must get out of here. Get out. Get out . . .

  The front door was nearer to me than the back. Besides, my car was out front, with my discarded phone lying in it. I would be safe in my car. Or I could go to a neighbour’s house. The nearest was over the garden wall, but the wall was too high to climb in a hurry and the odds were good that if I screamed, no one would hear me.

  I would go out the front way.

  I tried to stand up properly, but this was impossible. My body absolutely refused – it was as though I’d been nailed to the wall. The same instinct that had had me jump and brandish the knife before now welded me still, locking my joints.

  The wall behind me shook, or it might have been me, desperately wanting to move and not daring to. My ears sensitized to the silence to the point where I could hear the tiny, minuscule tick of the kitchen clock and the roar of the occasional traffic on the main road, several streets away. My shoulders were cold and damp, and cramped sporadically.

  I tried to swallow, but my throat was simply too dry.

  They had cut the phone and the electricity prior to coming into the house to get me. It was obvious, apparent, so why couldn’t I move?

  I held the steak knife before me with crabbed white hands.

  There was a sound; my head whipped round in its direction. It was coming from the back of the house – someone was trying the handle of the back door.

  This broke the spell. I stood up, the now violently juddering knife held ahead of me, and sidled towards the hall doorway, glancing each way. A faint glow suffused the frosted glass of the front door, enough to silhouette my jackets and coats, hung neatly on their pegs, the spaces where Eddy’s would have been louder than bombs right now. My work jacket, containing my car keys, was in the middle of them, and my hand drifted soundlessly into the pockets, searching for them. Behind me, the living-room door was a rectangle of opaque blackness, and through it came the creak of a window being tried – wood squealing against wood – carrying towards me through the blackness clearly and precisely, like notes of music.

  My hand closed over the keys.

  The sound of the window being raised stopped abruptly, only to be followed by deceitful silence.

  I blinked at my front door. One hand let go of the knife to unfasten the latch.

  A shadow might have flickered over the front of the door.

  I wanted to weep. I was trapped.

  What do they want? I screamed at myself, in the roaring quiet.

  Suddenly I made my mind up. To linger in the house was impossible. I must brave the door, shadow or no. If I was quick enough, I might surprise him – he would not be able to see me from outside, through the frosted glass.

  I gripped my knife and my courage, and wrenched it open.

  There was nothing out there but my lawn and my fence, and my red Audi parked on my street-lit driveway.

  I practically fell through the door, jerking it back behind me. The glass shattered as the door was flung against the inner wall, swinging wide. Instantly I knew I was not alone. Something cut down through the air, a line of cold fire, down my shoulder, over my collarbone, heading for my heart, my pounding heart . . . it was a knife, glittering in the icy air, wielded by a man who had appeared from nowhere, a man who must have been waiting for me, a short stocky man with a black coat and furious eyes staring out of a woollen balaclava.

  I thrust my own knife forward into his unprotected middle, shrieking as his flesh resisted for a second, rubbery and tough as the steak I usually used the knife upon. I jerked back in horror.

  The air left him in a low animal grunt. He doubled over, his weapon clattering uselessly away. I kicked at him, feeling hot liquid running down my breast.

  ‘Help!’ I screamed, but it was such a thin, strangled, pathetic noise that no one could have heard it. My vocal chords were knotted with fear. The blood on the knife I held was black and gleamed sickly in the orange light.

  ‘You fucking bitch . . .’

  It was the man from the school gates, Mr Megane – or at least I thought so; he was wearing the same leather jacket. He seemed about to rush me when he noticed what I was holding.
/>   ‘Stay there,’ I croaked, backing away from him towards the haven of my car.

  He eyed me speculatively from my own doorstep, doubtless calculating the best way to disarm me.

  Blood sopped heavily into my shirt, from my cut shoulder.

  ‘Just stay away.’

  Holding the knife at arm’s length, my right hand dipped into my pocket, alighting on a crumpled piece of paper and a sea of keys. I would have to take my eyes off the man in order to find the right one for the car. I very badly didn’t want to do that.

  The man on my doorstep took a hesitant step towards me. His posture was a study in objective cunning, his exposed lips curling as he concentrated – I might have been a wild animal he was hunting.

  ‘You’ve cut me, you fucking bitch,’ he said. He had a broad accent that sounded oddly familiar, though I couldn’t place it. I expect I had other things on my mind.

  ‘Get away from me!’

  He took another step closer, as though testing my resolve.

  ‘Get away!’ I howled, and then the fat black plastic surface of my car key was in my hand. I squeezed it hard, and my car barked out a little beep and flashed its lights as it unlocked.

  He chose this moment to rush me.

  Had I tried to retreat, undoubtedly he would have overpowered me. But I couldn’t. The car was behind me. So I lunged at him with the knife, as he came forward. A flash of terror distorted his visible features and he stopped in his tracks, sizing me up again.

  I jammed a hand into the door handle and wrenched the car open.

  ‘There’s no need to get so het up,’ said the man.

  ‘Get away from me. Right now.’

  ‘We can discuss this like calm, reasonable people.’

  The voice. There was something familiar about his voice.

  ‘Get the fuck away from me,’ I breathed. ‘I’ll kill you.’

  And it seemed he believed me. He backed off a pace, his eyes swivelling towards the left, betraying his intention to circle around the car, to the other side, the minute I got in. I could see him minutely, in my perfect state of panic, despite the darkness. His lips gleamed lightly with saliva, which he licked over them with his pale tongue.

  I ducked into the car, slamming the door shut and the lock down just in time. My shoulder was still hot but my breast was cold, chilled with some cooling liquid, as I revved up the car. The man had vanished.

  I stared around wildly, but he had gone. I had no time to worry about it. I had to get out of here. The car squealed backwards, and I caught one last fleeting glimpse of my redundant front door, swaying restlessly back and forth over the entrance to my dark and empty house, and then roared forward into the night.

  My hands were nerveless jelly around the wheel, and the bloodied knife lay next to me on the passenger seat. It was not dripping in gore, just lightly laced with it, blood beading minutely on the stainless steel. Blood . . .

  My shirtfront was a huge crimson stain, gently spreading. I had to go to a hospital. But I was so tired . . . so very tired and faint. Not frightened at all now, just tired. The hot liquid was gelid now, settling on my skin.

  The bleeding was stopping. I was too exhausted to be relieved.

  The uneven road shook me slightly . . . I was so tired. I couldn’t go on. I would faint over the wheel . . . a horn blared at me out of nowhere, and suddenly a man in another car was making an obscene gesture and screaming at me. I had to get off the road. My eyes kept rolling shut. At least the bleeding was stopping. Stopping . . . I had to stop. The engine thrummed gently in my ears, like a lullaby, and the road rocked me like a baby. I had to stop . . .

  When I woke up, I was in pitch blackness and absolute silence.

  18

  Katie wakes in darkness, as always, but there is a strange burr in her sleep-dazed brain that tells her she is not normally awake at this time.

  Something is different, but she doesn’t know what it is. It is cold, true, but no colder than usual, and in any case, now the nights are drawing in, her captor has recently upgraded her thin blanket with the addition of a musty-smelling candlewick bedspread.

  She sits up, stretching her wasted limbs, and suddenly realizes what it is.

  The house is in utter silence.

  She cranes her face upwards, towards where the ceiling is, forcing herself to become perfectly still as she concentrates.

  Normally, at any time of night or day, Chris is in evidence through his media spoor. Rubbish TV plays loudly round the clock – talk shows all day, old movies all night, and she suspects that he sleeps in front of it. Certainly all of the bedrooms he occasionally takes her into have the perfect, sterile look of a show house or museum. Even when he works in the gardens, facile talk radio carries through the air, its lively mutters audible even down here through the medium of the pipes.

  Sometimes she can hear him swearing explosively at these electronic voices, and at one point he threw something hard and the television went silent, which produced even more angry outbursts until the problem was corrected.

  The music he sometimes plays on Sunday is his only concession to peace – but even then, it is not listened to, it is merely noise, an aspirational ambience.

  Katie thinks of something Brian always says – wise men speak when they have something to say; fools speak because they have to say something. Chris cannot bear his own company, and since she cannot bear his company either, this makes perfect sense to her. This cocoon of empty, oblivious one-way chatter and white noise exists around him so that he is never alone with himself, and yet never in danger of being confronted by anyone else.

  She wonders, darkly, if she is also a part of this strategy.

  The silence now, however, is absolute.

  Wrapping the candlewick bedspread around herself, she shuffles over to the door and, as carefully as she can, conscious that this might be a trap of some sort, she tries the lock. It is as thoroughly bolted as ever.

  The thought comes to her, in a blinding instant of panic, that perhaps he has abandoned her. The message to Bethan Avery has sent him running, and he is never coming back.

  She is to starve to death in this cellar.

  No. No. She refuses to believe this. She is going to get through this. She has given up too much, lived through too much, for any other outcome, and besides, she is going to see her mum and Brian again. Her mum and Brian, who must be going frantic, who maybe even believe those stupid lies spread about Katie running away.

  When she thinks about how she spoke to Brian the last time she saw him, before she charged out of the house on that fatal night, a hot runnel of shame flows down from her head to her gut, burning everything in its path.

  Brian, not her dad, was the one that had always been there for her.

  She has to get out of here. She has to make it up to him, and to her poor mum.

  Katie crushes down these thoughts as they are too painful – she can barely manage her own horror and dread; contemplating her mother’s is more than she can bear. She raises her chin in the darkness and grits her teeth. She is going to get out of here. She is going to make it up to them both.

  As though she has conjured him, she hears his feet on the stairs – not his usual heavy tread, but something quicker, more irregular, and when he throws up the trapdoor she can hear his ragged breathing from where she sits, and the click of the switch in the passage. She remembers to scrabble back to her bed and lie down just as the cellar door swings wide and blinding light floods in.

  She blinks, slowly, deliberately, as though he has just woken her. She is amazed to find, considering her fears of being entombed alive a few minutes ago, that she is pleased to see him.

  The feeling lasts roughly ten seconds, ending as he stands over her, pulling off the candlewick bedspread with greedy haste. His face is in shadow, the light behind him, but the lit planes of his cheek and neck are shiny with sweat and, she thinks with a little burst of horror, she can smell blood.

  ‘It’s all right, sw
eetheart, it’s all right.’ His hands are freezing. ‘I’m going to fix this. Don’t worry. Now, come here.’

  19

  My first thought was that I was dead.

  I was curled into a foetal ball on the driver’s seat of my car, and I was shivering violently with cold – I’d shivered myself awake, in fact.

  I put my hands out to lift myself up and felt the hard matte plastic of the steering wheel. It was smeared thinly with something viscous and sticky that had a familiar smell. As I raised my arms even this slight distance, the pain wound about me like a serpent. My left shoulder was jelly, exquisitely painful jelly. It could take no weight at all, not even the weight of my arm. I touched it lightly with my other hand and it was boiling hot.

  I wanted to cry. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t move. I had no idea where I was, and it was dark – the hateful darkness was following me. The last thing I remembered was trying to drive to the hospital and then realizing, with the giddy objectivity of a dream, that I would never make it that far, and I would need to call them on the mobile to come and get me. That’s the last thing I remembered thinking; that I’d never make it. The last thing I remembered feeling was hunted – even as I’d left the man on my front lawn, I’d had the mounting paranoia that he was right behind me.

  Had he caught me?

  Was that why I was here? And where was here?

  After a minute or two feeling completely helpless I decided I had best try to do something.

  With my good hand I made a few vague weak passes at the car door handle beside me, without much success. Just as I was about to give up for a brief rest my fingers recalled the movement to open the door and it swung wide with an echoing creak.

  I rested for a moment in the faintest moonlight. The car was pulled up beside a big building, a warehouse, and there were some gigantic trucks parked nearby, blocky and silent. Their wheels were as high as my chest, or they would have been had I been able to stand up straight. There were a couple of thin windows in the very high walls of the building, and that was all I could see in the miserly amount of moonlight. I was parked before a huge roller shutter bay door, now closed and padlocked for the night.