by Amy Cross
***
“Tea,” Doctor Carrington said a short while later, as he set a steaming polystyrene cup next to her in the waiting room. “Always useful in an emergency, I find. Calms the soul.”
“Are you okay?” Alice asked, her voice still sounding a little frail but with the echo having already passed. “Are you sure I didn't hurt you?”
“Not even a scratch,” he replied, sitting next to her. “Believe it or not, I've had worse. Lucky those guards were around, though. They had to drag you kicking and screaming away from me. There was a five or ten second period back there when you just seemed to have completely lost control.” He took a sip from his own cup. “Do you still not remember any of the things you said to me during the session?”
She shook her head.
“So the man with the echoing voice...”
“I have no idea,” she told him. “It sounds like... maybe someone who's ill? I think I've had dreams about someone like that, but maybe that's all they were, and I'm getting them confused with reality. I mean, a man's voice can't actually echo like that, can it?” She paused. “Did my voice really echo for a moment?”
“I thought so at the time,” he replied, “but to be honest, it was very brief. The power of suggestion maybe...” He paused again. “We need to focus on more realistic points here, such as the fact that you were making real progress. The things you were saying during the session were like nothing else I've heard from you before. You were obviously terrified by the man who attacked you, you said he was sewing you shut from the inside.”
She paused as a shiver ran through her body. “The first thing I remember from that night,” she said finally, “is when I ran from the house. I'd managed to get some of the wire out of my mouth and eyes. At the hospital later, they removed more. Whoever that man was, he literally tried to seal my body shut, including...” She took a deep breath. “People always ask if he even sealed certain intimate places shut. He did.”
“I've seen the medical reports.”
“He caused a lot of damage. Things that won't heal.”
“You can move past that.”
“It was like he wanted to lock me in my own body,” she continued. “What kind of a monster would break into a house and do that to someone? They never even worked out how he broke in, either. It was like he was suddenly just inside, and then he killed the police officer... Why did he let me live?”
“Maybe that wasn't his plan. Maybe you just managed to get away.”
“Or maybe he needed me to be alive,” she pointed out.
“Another thing you said was that he wanted to hide in you.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have no idea. It's something for us to consider in future sessions, though. We know more now than we did an hour ago.”
“None of it makes sense,” she replied. “I feel like there's some kind of twisted logic at play, I feel like the whole thing made sense to the person who did this to me, but I can't quite get all the pieces to fit together. For the past ten years, I've felt like I'm constantly on the verge of some great moment of realization, but it just won't come. Why would my own mind be hiding all these things from me? It's like I'm sabotaging myself.”
He paused for a moment. “Would you consider more hypnosis sessions?”
“So I can attack you again?”
“I'm sure it wouldn't be like that.” He took another sip of tea. “Plus, we can take certain precautions now we understand how you'll be affected. I think you're right, Alice. I think all the pieces are in your head somewhere, we just need to tease them out and then work out how to slot them together, and I think that very soon now we're going to get to the bottom of it all. This whole confusing mess will make sense, we just need to -”
He stopped as he heard her phone ringing.
“Sorry,” she muttered, fumbling through her pockets, “I don't know who it could be.” Seeing an unrecognized number on the screen, she tapped to answer. “Hello? Alice Warner speaking.”
With a faint smile, Doctor Carrington took another sip of tea.
“I'm sorry,” Alice continued with a frown, “where?” She paused, listening to the person on the other end of the line. “I did?” Another pause. “No, I don't, not at all. Where did you say you're calling from again?” She listened for a moment longer, clearly not understanding much of what the other person was saying. “Okay, sure, I don't really know what you mean, but I can be there. I'll get a bus. Do you have visiting hours or can I come any time?” Another pause. “Okay, I'll do that. Thank you.” Cutting the call, she stared down at her phone for a moment, as if she had no idea what was happening.
“Problem?” Doctor Carrington asked.
“That was someone from Harledon Wood Retirement Home,” she replied, turning to him. “She said I'd given them my number and asked to be notified when one of their patients was close to death.”
“Do you not remember doing that?”
She shook her head. “I've never heard of the place.”
“Okay,” he continued, clearly a little surprised. “So who is it? Who's dying at Harledon Wood?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
1941
By the time dawn came, most of the fires had been put out.
A light rain was still falling as Wendy stepped back, and she watched as a fire truck raced past with several men hanging onto the sides. Voices were shouting in the distance, while the air was thick with the smell of burned wood and smoke, drifting through the streets after the fires that had burned during the night. Reaching the end of the street, she saw that around the next corner a row of terraced houses had been destroyed, while bodies were being loaded into waiting ambulances. Nearby, teary-eyed residents were watching in horror, too wrapped up in their own sense of shock to notice as Wendy slipped past them.
Eventually, after passing several more sites of destruction, she found herself on familiar territory, just a few streets from the house where she'd lived with her mother. Although she'd kept telling herself that there was no point going home, that she'd just end up staring at burned and broken timbers again, she'd nevertheless gravitated that way almost on auto-pilot. Her feet were sore and bloodied from walking for so long and she was hungry enough to cry, but she forced herself to hold back the tears as she finally got to the end of her street. For a moment, she allowed herself to hope against hope that somehow, magically, the house would have been rebuilt.
It hadn't been, of course.
She stood and stared at the ruins.
“Be good tonight,” she remembered her mother saying a few nights earlier, as she'd prepared to head off to work at the hospital. “I'm sorry to leave you alone, Wendy, but you'll have to be brave. You've had a lot of practice at that lately, haven't you? They need me. I'll be back around seven in the morning.”
Back around seven. If only her mother had kept to her word, she would still have been at work when the plane hit. Instead, for some reason that Wendy figured she'd never learn, her mother had returned in the middle of the night, after Wendy had gone out with Matthew to explore the dark city, and now... Making her way across the cobbled street, she realized that she had no idea where her mother's body had been taken. She stopped next to the spot where the front door had once been, and she looked at the dark, burned timbers that poked up toward the gray, rainy sky. It was almost as if the ribs of the house were still standing, twisted and damaged, after the meat had been burned away.
“Wendy?”
Turning, she saw to her surprise that Matthew was standing nearby, frowning at her.
“What happened to you?” he asked, taking a step closer. “Your face looks weird.”
She paused, before realizing what he meant. Reaching up, she felt a few rough scars around her chin and some more on her forehead. She'd forgotten about the burns, but she figured they wouldn't completely fade for a while, if at all.
“Do you know where they took her?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Mum.”
> “Yours?” He paused. “She's dead, Wendy.”
“I know, but -” She took a deep breath, determined to hold back the tears. She'd never cried in front of Matthew, not even when she'd cut her knee open a few months earlier while playing on another old bomb site. “Have they buried her yet?”
“I don't think so,” he replied cautiously. “Mum said there wasn't anything much left of your mother after the firemen went through the rubble.” He paused. “There was enough to be sure it was her, though.”
“Wendy?” another voice called out suddenly.
Looking across the road, Wendy saw that Matthew's mother, Mrs. Cooper, was standing in the doorway of their house, watching with concern.
“Come inside,” Mrs. Cooper continued, stepping out of the doorway and making her way over to Wendy. “Oh, you poor little thing, you look like you're in a complete state. Is that blood on your feet? Come on, we need to clean you up and get you something to eat. It's okay, Wendy. Everything's going to be alright.”
***
“What kind of woman?” Matthew asked a few minutes later as he and Wendy sat at the kitchen table, waiting for Mrs. Cooper to finish frying some eggs.
“She was weird,” Wendy replied, trying to work out how best to describe Hannah. She'd told Matthew the bare bones of the story, but she'd left out the parts about ghostly pilots and false faces being torn away. After all, she felt he'd just make fun of her and tell her she was imagining the whole thing, and she was worried that if people didn't believe her, she might end up being put in a mental asylum for crazy people. So she'd tried to make the whole thing sound more believable, even though that had meant leaving out a great deal. “She didn't seem to belong.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like she didn't have that...” She paused for a moment, thinking back to the way Hannah had talked. “Like she wasn't scared. You know how everyone else is scared, because of the war and the bombs? Even the people who say they aren't scared, and the ones who go on with their lives as if everything's normal... Even those people are scared, you can see it in their eyes, but Hannah wasn't like that, she seemed more like she was okay with everything.”
“Do you know where she lives?”
“I don't even know her last name.”
“She sounds weird,” Matthew replied, scrunching his nose up. “Maybe she's mad. Sometimes people do go mad, you know. The war makes it happen. My uncle Charlie ended up -”
“Matthew!” his mother hissed, turning to them. “Don't talk about your uncle Charlie.” She glanced at Wendy and smiled. “Are you feeling better, love?”
Wendy nodded. “Thank you, Mrs. Cooper.”
“How are your feet?”
“Sore.”
“And your burns?”
“They're sore too.”
“I'm just going to make a quick telephone call,” the woman replied, heading to the doorway. “You two be good.”
“My uncle Charlie went mad,” Matthew whispered, once his mother had left the room. “I heard Mum and Dad talking once, they said Charlie saw such horrid things when he was fighting, his mind couldn't handle it. Apparently, one time, he saw a tank burning, and his friends were trapped inside and they got cooked alive. He could hear them screaming and banging on the insides and eventually, when they got the top open, they found they'd all -”
“Stop it,” Wendy said firmly, not wanting to hear any more. “I don't want to know.”
“Not hearing about it doesn't mean it didn't happen.”
“I still don't want to talk about it,” she replied, thinking about all the people in the tunnels who'd been killed when the bomb fell during the previous night. For a moment, she imagined what it must have been like for them down there, screaming and burning and scrambling to get free. Hannah had said that none of them survived, and although she wanted to believe otherwise, Wendy felt that Hannah was the kind of person who was probably right about that sort of thing.
“He's in a hospital now,” Matthew added finally. “He screams all night. I liked him, though, he was alright. He gave me this.” Holding up his hand, he showed Wendy the black blob on his skin, just at the base of his right thumb.
“That's not a tattoo,” Wendy replied.
“It is! He gave it to me himself, before he went to war the last time. He used one of Mum's needles, he heated it up first, and he used ink from Mr. Roper's shop.”
“Tattoos are pictures of things,” she pointed out. “That's just a smudge.”
“It used to be a plane,” he replied, seeming a little sad as he looked at the blob. “It doesn't look as good now.”
Turning,Wendy saw that Mrs. Cooper was coming back from the front room.
“I hope you two are talking about something nicer now,” she said as she went back to check on the eggs. “Wendy, everything is going to be alright, you mustn't worry about a thing. I don't know where you've been for the past few days, but you won't have to struggle on your own anymore. It's not right. Even with a war on, there are basic standards we need to stick to, and one of those is looking after the children.”
“Thank you,” Wendy replied. “I was with Hannah.”
“And who's Hannah when she's at home?”
“My friend.” She paused, realizing she wasn't sure whether that was true. “I think.”
“Well she obviously didn't do a very good job of looking after you,” Mrs. Cooper replied. “The state of you earlier, I mean, it was enough to make me want to weep. You'll need your bandages changing soon, too.”
“I need to get it done again,” Matthew muttered, examining his tattoo more closely. “I wish uncle Charlie was sane so he could come and do it for me, but Dad says he's not coming back on account of his madness being incurable. He says some people can't be cured, that they just end up mad forever, and that he'd be better off dead.”
“Matthew!” Mrs. Cooper hissed. “I won't ask you again! Stop talking about such horrid things!”
As Matthew went back to talking about his desire to get his tattoo fixed, Wendy began to feel increasingly uncomfortable. Mrs. Cooper served eggs and bread, but there was a growing sense of concern in Wendy's belly, as if she could feel something getting closer. More than once, she glanced at the window, half expecting to spot someone watching her, but all she saw was more rain coming down, battering the bushes outside. Still, the sense of fear grew, as if a pair of hands was slowly reaching up from the pit of her belly, spreading its fingers through her chest and finally brushing its fingertips against the bottom of her heart. She swallowed hard, trying to keep from panicking even though she felt an overwhelming desire to run. She'd never realized that someone could feel so scared, especially when there wasn't anything scary around.
Finally, she couldn't hold back a moment longer.
“I have to -” she began to say, before she heard someone knocking on the front door.
“You two stay in the kitchen,” Mrs. Cooper said quickly, hurrying to the hallway as if she'd been expecting the interruption. “Finish your breakfast like good children. Don't waste rations.”
Wendy waited, listening as Mrs. Cooper opened the door and began to speak to someone. The sense of unease was still building, but she was also starting to feel as if whatever was out there, it trailed a sense of sickening familiarity. She heard Mrs. Cooper taking someone into the front room, and finally she climbed off the chair and made her way over to the doorway.
“Wendy,” Matthew hissed, “what are you doing?”
Ignoring him, she headed out into the hall.
“She's in a terrible state,” she heard Mrs. Cooper saying. “God alone knows where she's been for the past few days, but her feet are all cut up from walking. She obviously hadn't eaten or had much to drink, and she was dirty all over. She has bandages on her burns, too. They need changing, but I don't have anything that'll help.”
“This world is no place for a child to be wandering alone,” replied a softly-spoken female voice. “She has already been through so ver
y much.”
“Wendy,” Matthew whispered, “my mother said to stay in the kitchen!”
Still ignoring him, she edged along the hallway until she reached the door to the front room. She paused for a moment, before leaning around the corner.
“There she is,” Mrs. Cooper said, spotting her immediately.
Wendy let out a gasp of shock as soon as she saw the elderly woman on the other side of the room, wearing a nun's habit.
“Wendy,” Mrs. Cooper continued, reaching a hand out to her, “come and meet Sister Agnieska, the Mother Superior of Barton's Cross -”
“No!” Wendy shouted, turning and racing to the front door, only to pull it open and crash straight into a figure who was waiting outside.
“Calm down,” Sister Julia said, grabbing Wendy by the shoulders. “It's okay, it's only me.”
“Leave me alone!” Wendy shouted, struggling to get free before a police officer stepped closer and grabbed her arms. “I'm not going back!”
“Of course you are,” Sister Julia said with a smile, as Sister Agnieska and Mrs. Cooper came to join them. “Wendy, you have nowhere else to go. The law states that you're now a ward of Barton's Cross, and I can assure you that the monastery is the very best place for you to be right now.” She smiled, as if she was happy and expected Wendy to feel the same way. “Don't worry, we won't be letting you slip away from us again.”
Further back, by the kitchen door, Matthew watched as Wendy was dragged away sobbing.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Today
“He's in here,” the nurse said as she opened the door to one of the retirement home's private rooms. “I'll just check if he's up for visitors.” Leaning through, she smiled. “Matty? Alice Warner is here to see you. Is it okay if I let her in?” After a moment, she turned back to Alice with a smile. “He's all yours. Just try not to tire him out too much.”
“Thank you.”
Stepping into the room, Alice saw a frail old man in a bed by the window, with various wires and tubes connecting him to a set of machines. A heart monitor was beeping steadily, while a nearby table was filled with flowers that had evidently been brought by well-wishers.