by Rosie Walker
She knows what’s happening now.
But still she doesn’t feel scared. She just feels tired. But she knows she needs to do something.
Do something.
Do something, stupid.
This is bad.
Act.
Her limbs won’t move.
She breathes in hard.
She screams the loudest, most blood-curdling scream she’s ever screamed. She screams until her lungs are raw, her throat burns, and her mouth is dry.
Thomas
A piercing scream fills Thomas’s ears, ripping the smile off his face. It’s too loud and so quick, and then it’s over as suddenly as it began.
Then there’s silence. Thomas opens his mouth to say—
And then a slam of a car door. Very close.
Maggie stops giggling and they both hold their breaths. The silence is so thick it almost hums.
‘What was that?’
‘Switch off the light.’
She fumbles with the torch, but she can’t seem to get her thumb onto the switch. The light hits the ceiling and threatens to shine at the window as she wrestles with it. Giving up, she thrusts the beam into her chest, stifling the light with her jumper.
A small ring of light shines around the torch until Maggie manages to finally extinguish the bulb. Her eyes are wide and white, glinting through the darkness. Her pupils are huge, darting around trying to see in the dark.
Thomas is unable to move. He strains his ears to hear anything, but after that screech and bang, everything is silent.
Thomas and Maggie stare at each other across the caravan; all he can hear is the sound of their ragged, panicked breathing.
‘Let’s go. Let’s go. Oh my God, let’s go home,’ whispers Maggie.
Thomas loops the binoculars back around his neck and slides off the makeshift table, careful to make as little noise as possible when he lands. Maggie shoves her notebook into her pocket and grabs Thomas’s hand. Maggie’s breath flutters against his cheek as she whispers in his ear.
‘Just open the door and run for it,’ she says. ‘Don’t look around and don’t stop.’
He nods, unable to speak. He puts his hand on the door handle and moves it slowly, wincing at every squeak and click as it turns. Maggie points at the path through the woods, the one they came through earlier, what seems like hours ago now. Thomas nods again, and then they run fast and straight like dogs let off their leads.
They hare into the darkness of the trees, and Thomas doesn’t stop to close the door, or even check where the screaming came from. He doesn’t look back.
DAY TWO
Helen
Helen opens a browser and types ‘Lancaster missing girls’ into the search bar. Pages and pages of results: teenagers missing, then found; girls from Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the United States; girl kidnapped, girl found safe; sighting of teenager; girl found dead.
She’s about to search for Janet Mitchell’s articles, see how much of a hack she really is, when the office door opens. ‘Morning, Helen,’ a voice chirps.
Helen alt-tabs to an Excel spreadsheet, and columns of numbers obscure her search results. There are no answers there. It’s a deep hole with no way out. The footsteps approach her desk; she looks up.
It’s Diane, Gary’s assistant, carrying a stack of paperwork, an ingratiating smile on her face. Helen feels her facial muscles slacken. She nods hello.
‘Just got these forms for you to fill in. If you could get them completed and back to Gary, photocopied, by lunchtime, that would be great.’
‘Mmmhm,’ Helen mumbles.
Diane hands over the papers. Her long nails are painted dark red, perfectly manicured. ‘A couple of us are going out for a drink after work tonight if you fancy it?’ she asks.
Helen looks down at her own dull fingernails, preparing a polite refusal, but as she opens her mouth to reply the phone begins to ring. She gives Diane an apologetic smile and shrugs.
‘Good afternoon, NHS Property Services, Helen speaking.’
‘Ms Summerton?’
‘Yes. How can I help?’
Diane pats the pile of paperwork with a red-tipped hand and leaves the office. Helen waves vaguely at her departing back.
‘Apologies for disturbing you at work.’ The voice on the other end of the line sounds throaty. ‘Zoe’s file had this listed as an emergency contact number.’
Helen’s muscles freeze. She inhales sharply through her nose.
‘This is Kevin Byass, Zoe’s Principal at Lancaster College.’
Helen’s terrified that something awful has happened. ‘Is everything alright?’
‘Not quite. I’m calling to discuss Zoe’s attendance record.’
Relief. Not exactly an emergency. ‘Right. Is there a problem?’
‘Zoe didn’t attend today’s History revision session. You might know, the college monitors student attendance closely and as soon as it falls below eighty-five per cent, we take action.’
Helen looks up, her gaze travelling across the room. Norah is talking on the phone, Tina filing her nails. The other members of the Planning Team must be out for site visits. At the end of the room, she can see Gary through the glass window of his office, his back to her.
‘Oh dear.’ She doesn’t know what else to say. ‘It was a revision session; are those compulsory?’
A sigh rattles down the line. ‘Yes. And Zoe’s attendance of my History class last term was approximately sixty per cent,’ says the headmaster.
Helen remains silent.
‘We sent a letter home last month.’ He pauses, expectant.
‘I did receive that. I’ll talk to her again when she gets home.’
‘She needs to focus at this time of year.’
She sits up straighter and rolls her eyes. ‘Yes, I know. I’ll tell her again.’
‘She’s a good student, but it seems her attention has been elsewhere for a couple of months.’
She feels a prickle of irritation. Even years after leaving school herself, a reprimand from a teacher still makes her flushed and awkward. Her voice has a cold edge: ‘I will talk to her. Thank you for calling.’
She hangs up, returning to the reports, but she can’t concentrate. She pulls her mobile from her handbag to phone Zoe and have a go, give her the usual lecture.
But her phone says four missed calls: one from the College, three from Tony.
She opens a new text message. It’s from Tony:
Call me back please. Urgent.x
This isn’t good. Why didn’t he call her work number if he couldn’t get through? ‘Arsehole,’ she says.
She tries to call him, but it rings and rings until it hits voicemail.
Then she tries Zoe: straight to voicemail; it doesn’t even ring.
‘Fuck,’ she says, louder than intended. She tries to focus on her computer, but finds herself staring at the screen, her eyes unfocused, while she mentally runs through what could be happening. Her breaths are short and shallow.
Zoe probably left her phone charger at home before she went to her Dad’s and didn’t charge her mobile overnight. The battery’s dead. It’s happened before.
And non-attendance at the History session, that’s normal too. Just teenagers being teenagers. But still, Helen can’t concentrate. She needs to do something; staring blankly at her PC screen while obsessively calling Zoe’s voicemail isn’t enough.
Gary pokes his head out of his office door and scans the room. His gaze lands on Helen, and she knows he’ll head over soon to ask about her progress on the paperwork.
She sends Diane a quick email, promising the completed forms in the afternoon, and leaves the office carrying a folder of papers so she looks like she’s going out to a meeting.
She finds herself on a picnic bench on the edge of the Lancaster Canal, around the corner from her office. A barge floats past; the captain smiles and waves at Helen. She nods to him and looks back at her phone as the boat continues under the stone bridge. A c
rowd of ducks gather at her feet as she calls Tony again. No answer.
‘Jesus, Tony, answer your phone.’
A group of daytime drunks sit at the next bench along the canal, a Staffordshire bull terrier running around their feet and barking. One of the men looks up at her voice, then looks away again quickly.
She calls Zoe’s mobile, still voicemail. Zoe has probably been skipping classes to spend time with Dane or bunk off with Abbie. Abbie’s influence has been sinking Zoe’s grades for the past year. That must be it. Hopefully that’s all it is. But Helen can’t quell the rising panic. She has so little control over Zoe’s life. She doesn’t even know where her daughter is half of the time, or who she’s with.
The bull terrier climbs out of the water and shakes, spraying the drunks with stagnant water. The drinkers jeer and one of them lobs an empty can at the dog, causing the dog to skitter into the path of the passing cyclist.
The cyclist swerves towards the water, missing the dog and veering dangerously close to the edge of the canal bank. ‘Watch your dog!’ calls the cyclist as he rights himself and continues along the path.
The drunks laugh. ‘Fuck off!’ one of them shouts, sticking two fingers up at the cyclist as he pedals away from them.
Helen tries to remember how to breathe. In, out – big, deep intakes of air to compensate for her shallow gasps of the last ten minutes.
‘She’s fine. She’s probably fine,’ she says to herself.
One of the drunks looks over at her, points and says something to the rest of the group. They giggle and stare at her. Helen shuts her eyes and turns back to the ducks.
Zoe got drunk with her friends last night. She’ll be lying in bed at Tony’s, nursing a stinking hangover and refusing to get up to go to college. Tony’s probably calling to whine about their daughter’s bad behaviour and ask for Helen’s advice.
Finally, her phone screen lights up with a call from Tony.
She presses the green ‘Answer’ button and before she can say anything, the tremor in Tony’s voice confirms her worst fears.
‘What’s happened? Is everything alright?’
His breath hisses along the line. ‘Oh, God, Helen. She didn’t come home last night.’
Zoe
It’s like she’s inside a dirty fish tank, or under water in a pond. The walls emerge from the darkness as the sun rises, October light gradually filling the space with a strange, blue-green hue. The light is green because of algae or moss – green stuff, anyway – growing over the rounded window panes.
Zoe aches all over. What happened last night? It’s a minute or two before she remembers anything at all, and then the night comes back in quick bursts of images. With each flash of memory, her heart beats harder and faster. Abbie, Dane, and Max in the pub, and Abbie being difficult; Abbie talking to the guy at the bar who bought them drinks; feeling drunker than she’d ever been in her life, then blackness. Nothing.
Something awful happened.
Terrible.
There’s this anxious, nagging feeling in her gut that just won’t go away. Like the ‘What did I do last night?’ feeling of a hangover, but a thousand times worse.
The rounded plastic of the windows looks like she’s in a caravan. But why is she in a caravan?
Where’s her phone? She pats her jeans pocket where she always keeps it, but the pocket is empty. It must have fallen out somewhere since the pub. Since … flashes of memory: a man’s face, an arm around her shoulder.
Her mouth fills with saliva, as if she’s about to vomit. She swallows, feeling her throat muscles push the bile and spit back down into her stomach. Her skin prickles with a mixture cold and fear, hairs standing on end.
Her arms hurt so much. She tries to stretch them, but they won’t move. Her breath catches in her throat. There’s something around her wrists. Her hands are tied together behind her back. She feels sick with fear, but her stomach feels so empty that she knows that even if she retched and retched nothing would come up.
She looks around the room again. It’s definitely a caravan – the ceiling curves away at the end in that rounded way that caravans have. But no one’s had a holiday in this caravan for years. It smells of decay and damp and it gets in her throat and nose.
Her mouth is so dry, but there’s no water here – not even a sink with a grimy tap. Her tongue feels like sandpaper. She tries not to move it inside her mouth.
She pulls at the cord around her wrists, testing the strength of the knots. The knots are tight, and it seems like the rope is tied around something behind her.
She seems to be on the floor, lino cold and damp against her back. She sits up slowly, dizziness causing the room to spin around her as she raises herself upright. She twists around, trying to see what she’s tied to. If she can just loosen the knots and stand up, she might be able to get out of this somehow. Hopefully.
Either way, she can’t just sit here and wait for something to happen to her. If she has any kind of chance of getting out of this, she has to do something, and do it soon.
She takes a moment to sit still, listening. The wind rustles through leaves outside. She must be in a wood. But there’s no other sound. Somewhere remote, then. She’s safe to move.
She shifts forward a few inches, tugging at the rope. Her arms burn from being restrained behind her for so long.
The rope is looped around an oven door handle. If she can yank it hard enough, she can probably knock the oven door loose to open it and gain some distance. She shuffles forward; her arms pull the rope taut behind her. She hears the oven creak as she pulls. She shifts forward further, her arms pulling backward and sending streaks of pain up her arms to her shoulders. But she keeps moving. A sore arm is better than getting murdered.
Panic rises up in her throat, fizzing and burning, like acid rushing through her whole body. She closes her eyes; there’s no time for that. Focus.
When she reaches the limit of the rope, she jerks forward, yanking at the ropes in a desperate effort to open the oven door. Sharp pain shears through her shoulders and upper arms as she pulls, still tangled up by the rope. She’s still tied.
She sits for a minute or two, waiting for the pain in her arms to subside. She gently lifts one shoulder after another, testing the joints to ensure her shoulders are still in their sockets. They’re painful but operational, no damage done.
It’s still quiet. No one’s heard, and no one’s coming for her. Not yet, anyway. She breathes, like Mum taught her when she used to graze her knees and she was in pain: take a breath in, and out. In, and out. Keep breathing, one breath at a time and eventually she’ll find a way out.
It seems like her wrists are tied together with one piece of rope, which has around half a metre of slack running between each wrist. She’s limited to a small radius around the oven, but its open door means she can move further around the space.
She takes another breath, tries to remember more from the night before. She goes back to the beginning: remembers eating dinner with Dad and Melanie, the kids whining and fussing. In the car with Dane, driving through the dusk to the pub. Walking across the car park, into the doors of the pub.
Oh.
There’s another flash of memory from last night.
The doors opened and there, directly across from the entrance was Abbie standing at the jukebox picking songs, just as Zoe thought she would be. But there was one detail that Zoe hadn’t predicted.
Oh, my God. Abbie standing at the jukebox with the man, picking songs together. Laughing. Their shoulders touching.
Abbie knows him. Abbie knows the guy who drugged Zoe; the monster who tied her up and trapped her here.
Thomas
‘Who’s heard the phrase, “Here be dragons”?’
A few hands go up, Maggie’s included.
Thomas lifts the lid of his desk to hide from Mr Ketteridge; he doesn’t know the answer. There are his glasses, in his desk next to his Luke Skywalker pencil case and Spider-Man rubber, right where he left
them yesterday. He puts them on and shuts the desk lid.
‘It means there’s monsters in that part of the country!’ shouts Simon Tindall, who has trouble waiting for his turn.
Mr Ketteridge shakes his head.
Maggie rolls her eyes. ‘No, it doesn’t.’ Thomas can feel her wriggling, trying not to blurt out, but the need to share what she knows must have got the better of her.
‘Go on then, Miss Everett.’
‘People wrote that on maps when they didn’t know what was in that place. They hadn’t been there, so they hadn’t mapped it yet.’
‘Very good, Maggie,’ says Mr Ketteridge. He calls her Maggie when he’s pleased with her and Miss Everett when he isn’t. ‘Map makers used to draw pictures of sea monsters and dragons in areas of the map where they didn’t know what was there. And they’d write things like “Here be lions” or “Here be dragons”.’ He pauses and looks around the whole class, holding eye contact with each person for a moment before moving on to the next one. ‘People are afraid of what they don’t know.’
Maggie looks at Thomas then, her eyebrows raised. She’s trying to communicate something.
‘I just remembered a thing,’ she whispers to him, too loudly again. ‘It’s really important.’
‘A lot of mapmakers made mistakes, and those mistakes were passed from map to map, often for hundreds of years. And sometimes you can tell a lot by what’s not on a map.’ Mr Ketteridge starts talking about people who believed in dragons and sea monsters and it’s really interesting, except that Maggie keeps poking him in the ribs.
‘Tom, listen,’ she hisses.
‘Shhhhh,’ says Thomas, straining to hear stuff about sea serpents and basilisks and explorers from the olden days.
Maggie shoves him, hard, and he slides from his chair and off the other side. ‘OW! Maggie, you DICK!’
‘MR MITCHELL! MISS EVERETT!’ shouts Mr Ketteridge. ‘I’ve been trying to ignore your misbehaviour, but this is just one step too far.’