The Missing

by Daisy Pearce

  ‘Samantha? Can you hear me? Samantha?’

  It’s cold in there. It has that strange, deserted quality that houses left empty for some time possess: a vacancy, almost a grief. There’s a pattering sound in the hallway, like running water, or fast-moving feet. My blood chills.

  ‘Samantha, for fu—’

  A hand, reaching out of the blackness, circling my wrist in a sharp, snapping motion. I scream.

  ‘Shut up, for God’s sake! I’m trying to listen!’ She tugs at me, hard. ‘If you’re not coming in, then piss off home, Frances.’

  I almost do. I make it as far as the furthest corner of the house, where long arching fingers of buddleia brush against my face. What stops me is the graffiti I find written there, almost obscured by a clump of stinging nettles. The rust-coloured paint has run and faded, but the message is still legible: Where is Edie Hudson???

  I catch the collar of my coat on the raw edge of the bent metal and hear a satisfying rrrrip sound as I drag myself through the gap and into the bungalow. Glass crunches as I land awkwardly, twisting my ankle beneath me. Dust settles in my throat and sinuses, making me want to sneeze. What are you doing? the sensible voice in my head shrieks. All this just to spite William? All this just to dig into his past? Go home, Frances.

  As my eyes adjust to the dark I see Samantha in the doorway, her back to me. Some of the dust sheets are spattered with paint and damp, giving them an eerie Rorschach effect. It gives me a jolting memory of William and me on our holiday in Tenerife, drinking sweet red cocktails and watery pina coladas. He asked me if I ever used ink-blot tests in my work.

  ‘Rorschach?’ I said, stirring my cocktail idly. ‘That’s psychology. It’s a different type of therapy. I don’t do that.’

  ‘Shame,’ he answered. ‘I always wanted to try.’

  I picked up the napkin beneath my glass and, eyes fixed firmly on William’s as I did so, poured a little of my cocktail in the crease, folding it carefully before opening it before him.

  He studied the dark mirror image for a moment before lifting his head and looking right at me. ‘I see you,’ he said. When he took my hand I felt something blooming in my stomach, a warmth, a sticky, carnivorous love.

  When I reach Samantha, I see what she is looking at. Someone has drawn a swastika on the wall. They’ve made a bad job of it and paint has run down into the floorboards. There is a hole in the door leading to the kitchen, like someone has put a fist through it. More scuffling in the corridor and the sound of a door creaking slowly closed. Or open, a little internal voice speaks up. I put my hand on Samantha’s shoulder.

  ‘Do you smell it?’ she asks me.

  I nod. Something has died and rotted away somewhere in this house. I’m reminded of a story I heard once about a remote asylum in Ohio. An inmate there disappeared, the body eventually found in the attic over a month later. When the decomposing corpse was removed, they found a stain beneath it; a ghostly outline of the body in chalky white, and no matter how hard workers tried to clean the floor, the stain would not come out.

  ‘Back then, the whole graveyard smelt like this,’ Samantha tells me in a low whisper. ‘He was killing rabbits and just leaving them to rot.’

  ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘Well, Frances, I’m no pathologist, but I think there’s a dead body down there.’

  ‘But – but you know it can’t be Edie, right? She’s been gone almost twenty years.’

  Samantha turns towards me in the darkness. I see the flat glaze of her eyes. ‘Well, then, we’d better go and see who it is, hadn’t we?’

  Together we sidle down the hallway, backs pressed against the wall where the flowered paper peels away in long strips to reveal grey plaster, damp to the touch. The smell of urine and rot is stronger out here. As we creep towards the kitchen I can see the units have been destroyed; cupboard doors hang from hinges and gas pipes jut through the wall, black holes like wide, unblinking eyes. I can see the place where the sink once stood, and the cooker, and the fridge: the large pale outlines against the dark walls like the ghosts of furniture past. I think of that dead woman turning to liquid in the asylum attic and the imprint that can never be cleaned away and I reach for Samantha, squeezing her hand so hard she gasps. Her skin is icy, and there is a tremor running through her. She’s afraid.

  Across the bumpy lino of the kitchen floor is another door, partly open, revealing a slice of black space. The rustling sound is coming from inside. We exchange a glance. Samantha pulls the knife from her pocket and together we cross the room as quietly as we can, trying to ignore the fetid smell that is rising up from the basement like something corroded and black.

  It’s Samantha who eases the door open carefully, allowing us room to slide through. The stairs creak ominously, and the darkness is thick and so dense that I feel I might reach out and stroke it. The smell is the worst of it, so putrid it is almost toxic. Sweet, like spoiled meat. I want to go back, I try to say, I want to get out into the light and the clean air. Something bad has happened down here, something unspeakable. This whole house is an open wound, festering. Someone should burn it to the fucking ground.

  ‘God!’ Samantha suddenly cries out, jumping in horror. I feel the panic run through her and almost turn and bolt back up the stairs.

  Instead I hear my voice, high-pitched, scared, saying, ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘Something just – it got hold of my foot!’

  Bile, rising in my throat. Samantha fumbles in the darkness and in that moment when she lets go of my hand the darkness and isolation feel so total I could be adrift in deep space. I resist the urge to reach out for her, panicky. Adrenaline, bright in my mouth and behind my eyes, purple pulses in the darkness. Suddenly Samantha’s face is lit by her phone screen and she swivels it outward in order to see the basement better.

  A litter of newspaper across the floor, a stack of mildewy boxes in the corner, collapsing in on themselves. Shelves hanging ragged on the walls, brick walls slick with condensation, and mould spots black as tar.

  ‘See? There!’

  I look where Samantha is pointing. A rat, a big one, bristly body and thick pink tail, suddenly darting for the safety of the shadows. She runs the light along the ground, picking out discarded carrier bags and stacks of yellowed magazines turning to pulp in the damp. Then, we see it.

  We both recoil. Samantha makes a noise in the back of her throat, urk!, and for a second I think she is going to be sick. I run my hands over my face, stomach turning queasily. The dog must have been lying down here for some time, judging by the ragged remains. Partially skeletal, glimpses of bone through blackened skin. Where its stomach should be is just a cavity, torn apart by ferocious rodent teeth. There is a pool of dried blood beneath it on which flies settle and lift. Something long and purple has unspooled from the hole in its stomach. It makes me think of the sheep in the well, rotting to liquid while a young boy peered over the edge, fascinated. I look away, my hand over my mouth, the taste of the beer I’ve drunk rising in my throat. Samantha approaches the dog and peers at it. For a moment I wonder what the hell she is doing, and then she turns and looks at me over her shoulder.

  ‘No collar,’ she says sadly. ‘Poor little guy. Must’ve been the rats we heard. There’s probably hundreds of them eating off this thing.’

  Behind Samantha, pushed against the far brick wall, is a long chest freezer. I’m flooded with a sudden dread, a brisk shiver. The image I had earlier of Edie Hudson lying wrapped in her plastic burial shroud – lips blued and dusted with frost, eyes like blank pennies – surfaces suddenly in my mind. Samantha is dusting herself down and telling me we should get out of there.

  I point behind her and say, in as normal a voice as I can manage, ‘Check in there.’

  Samantha sees the freezer and I notice her face change, even in the weak light of the phone. There’s a falling-away, like a shelf of Arctic ice. Her eyes seem to marble; it’s frightening to look at. It’s like something inside her has been
punctured and everything that’s vital is being slowly sucked away. I walk over to her and put my hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I c-c-can’t—’ she stutters, shaking her head, stepping away from me, crossing her arms over her chest. ‘Frances, I can’t look in there, I can’t.’

  ‘Okay,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll do it.’

  I think she will stop me. I almost want her to, and then we can get out of this pit and into the sunlight. I want to shower in water so hot it leaves my skin pink and boiled. Tonight I know I will have bad dreams, of dead dogs dragging themselves towards me, muzzles foaming with decay, of dead girls with skin turned blue with cold, opening their mouths and blasting me with chips of ice that slice into my skin again and again and again.

  They say what you don’t know can’t hurt you. How stupid, I’ve always thought. Knowledge is power. I get it now, though. As I put my fingers under the lid of the large freezer and lean in to lift it, I get it. Behind me, Samantha is breathing fast, almost panting. She has retreated to the foot of the stairs, where she stands hunched over herself, just the flat sheen of her eyes visible in the darkness. Just as I heave the lid open I’m almost sure that what I will find in here is not Edie but Quiet Mary, her bones rattling like dice.

  I shine the phone in. The beam of light trembles. What I see makes me weak with relief. I almost laugh.

  I turn to Samantha. ‘It’s empty,’ I say.

  She begins to laugh and then it abruptly changes to harsh, choking sobs, so sudden I don’t know how to respond. I see her buckle, sliding down the damp wall to sit on the bottom stair, clutching herself, hair worked free of her bun and hanging in her face. I cross the room quickly, trying not to cry out when I connect with something soft and yielding underfoot, and kneel in front of her. For a little while she is crying so hard I can’t make her words out. I shush her ineffectively, patting her shoulder, stroking her hair. ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s okay, Samantha. Edie wasn’t in there.’

  By the time she catches her breath the violent shaking has stopped and her face no longer has that dead, slack look that so unnerved me. She wipes her eyes with the heels of her hands and just as I am about to ask her if she is all right, she snaps, ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  We find a nearby pub. We must look a sight, the two of us, staggering into the Queen’s Arms with dirt-streaked faces and cuts all over our hands from scrambling out through rusty metal boards. As I order a couple of pints – ‘and two whisky chasers,’ Samantha adds, ‘doubles’ – she flexes her hands and says drily, ‘I hope you’ve had your tetanus shots.’

  We take a seat in a booth with high-backed wooden pews and sit and stare at each other, draining our glasses quickly and ordering another round. The music is loud but the pub is quiet, with only a few old boys playing darts in the furthest corner. Samantha is spinning a bar mat on its corner, flipping it, sliding it around the table. She doesn’t meet my eye.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says evenly, when she comes back inside from smoking her third cigarette. ‘I went to pieces a bit. That hasn’t happened for a long time. Took me by surprise.’

  ‘Sam—’

  She holds up her hand. ‘I’m happy the freezer was empty. Of course I am. I want you to understand that, okay? If Edie had been in there I don’t know what I would have done. Screamed the place down, probably. Set fire to it. I don’t know. But at least—’ She searches for the words, fiddling with her necklace, and even though I know what she’s going to say, even though I can see her discomfort, I let her because she has to be able to say it. ‘At least if she’d been in that freezer I would have known. Edie was fifteen years old the day she disappeared. I’ve thought about her every day since. You know how hard that is?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘When she was born I nearly handed her back to the midwife. “You take her, I don’t want her. She frightens me. I made a mistake. I don’t want her.” God. When I think of it now—’

  ‘But how could you have known?’

  ‘I’m a fucking monster. No, really.’ She laughs, shaking her head as I start to refute her. ‘I am and it’s okay. It is. That’s what I think about every day. Her, a newborn, unknowing and innocent, and me, saying over and over, “I don’t want her.”’

  She gulps for air, teary-eyed. I look at her, feeling my own tears burning in my throat. I think of the empty box room at home, the one I’ve been hopefully calling the ‘nursery’ for nearly four years. I turn thirty-four next year, just a year older than Edie would be now if she hadn’t spirited herself away. I’m running out of time. I don’t think of myself as maternal but sometimes I see a woman with a baby strapped to her chest or pushing a pram and something clenches inside me, a pain so great it is almost a bereavement. I see Samantha’s pain reflected in my own, that feeling of loss and separation, and I realise that this is the root of my rage, the one that burns red-hot, scorching through my insides. It’s not William’s betrayal. It’s the loss. The baby. Our baby. The one he’s never had any intention of giving me.

  I reach across the table and take Samantha’s hands in mine, cocooning them. We sit that way a long time, and the sky begins to darken outside.

  By the time I get back to Thorn House it is gone seven, and William has left increasingly agitated messages on my phone. Where are you? What time will you be home? I’m getting worried, Frances, call me. I walk calmly into the kitchen, my head a little clouded with booze, and see William sitting at the dining table. The smell of rosemary and garlic sweetens the air. I put my bag on the chair, rubbing the back of my neck.

  ‘Smells good.’

  William looks up at me, dark-eyed and serious. ‘I was worried about you. You should have called.’

  ‘I just lost track of time. Is this food left for me?’

  ‘You’ve been gone for hours,’ he snaps, before adding, ‘Yes. Doubt it’ll still be warm.’

  ‘How’s your mum?’

  ‘Alex is in there with her now. It’s been difficult today. She thinks she’s back in Blackpool in 1963. Keeps asking for a go on the Ferris wheel.’

  I uncover the plate left for me on the counter. It’s pasta with a tomato sauce, rich and thick and glossy, but my appetite curdles at the sight of it. I don’t think I could eat another of those greenhouse tomatoes, fat and red, nurtured by black dirt and bonemeal, the scraps of living things. I put the plate back over it and pour myself a glass of water instead.

  ‘Where have you been? You stink of booze.’

  He comes up behind me and clatters his dirty plate into the sink. The problem with William and Alex is that they were brought up like tiny kings, who never needed to do anything as menial as housework. When William first moved in with me I had to teach him how to hoover and iron his own clothes. Mimi still thought of them as her little boys, even after they developed chest hair and their voices dropped. I watch him do it, and say nothing. I’ve told him before I’m not his cleaner.

  ‘I was in the pub.’

  ‘You should have said. I could’ve done with a drink myself.’ He lifts my hands, turning them over to study my palms. They are scratched and blotchy, cold to the touch. ‘What have you been doing, Frances? Who were you with?’

  ‘I need to go and have a shower, William.’

  Too late. He spots the rip in the collar of my coat and lifts it with the tip of his finger. His eyes travel down my body and rest on the small bloodstain on my T-shirt.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ he says flatly, lifting the material to reveal the small, star-shaped puncture wound clotted over with dried blood. ‘And you’re shaking.’

  I’m angry. Inside, I’m a blizzard of cold, hard rage. It buckles me, twisting my organs into hard, calcified objects like crystals found under the earth. I am slowly turning to stone.

  ‘Frances, what’s going on? Please talk to me.’

  I look up. His face is so linear; the long line of his nose, the sharp edges of his cheekbones flaring against his skin. He is a man of angles and mathematics, cold logic
. He compartmentalises; that’s always been his problem. Isolates himself. I open my mouth to tell him the truth of it – I wanted a baby and you took my chance away and you’re spending all our savings on a girl on a screen and you lied to me, you lied, you lied – but then he says something that knocks me back on my heels.

  ‘Do you remember when we first met, Frances?’

  I stare at him. ‘Yes. You took me to the cinema. We watched Slumdog Millionaire.’

  ‘No. That was our first date. Before that. When we met.’

  I stiffen. Why is he bringing this up now? I feel a cold frost creeping up my arms. ‘Yes,’ I say. My voice is very small.

  William reaches up a hand and tucks a stray hair behind my ear very, very gently. ‘It’s almost like you had a twin,’ he continues, in that same soft voice, ‘but you killed her. Isn’t it?’

  I don’t speak. I just look at him. There is no trace of the person I was when William and I first met. I razed her to the ground.

  ‘You remember the old you, Frances? What do you think she would make of you now? I often wonder.’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t ever think about it.’ Not true. That bright blue paint in long, looping spatters. The way the word had been written in letters four feet high across the hallway. Whore. ‘Why are you bringing this up, William?’

  ‘Alex said you’d been looking through the old photos. He mentioned that you’d been asking questions about it. About me, and my old friends. About Edie. I suppose I thought if you wanted to rake over my past we may as well do yours as well.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No! I was – that wasn’t me. Not who I am, not really.’ If you keep telling yourself that, one day it will be true, I think coldly.

  When I think back to the day I met William Thorn for the first time, the memory is slippery and black as an eel. It comes to me in a series of images: the big house in a small town on Osborne Road, brickwork and windows blackened by soot, the sound of the door buzzer like an angry insect, the bed that sagged in the middle, the coldness of the mattress in the winter, a pile of used tissues, waking with the taste of cocaine in the back of my throat, cold sores, the thinness of the curtains that let the light through. Tiny flats with paper-thin walls. Worn carpet. The couple next door who had grinding, panicky sex that seemed to last forever. They spoke a fast, urgent language that might have been Polish. I don’t know.