The ticking engine, the blow of the car’s heaters, his own quickened breaths … but still nothing from the girl.
He should move on and act like he’d not seen her. He knew how to do nothing. Besides, people saw ghosts all the time. He didn’t need to tell anyone about it. No one would believe him if he did.
Find a shitty hotel and get some sleep. It had been a long day. Tar pumped through his veins, fatigue creeping into his aching muscles. Tomorrow, once rested, he could ignore the reports of a missing girl if they came. Turn a blind eye to the articles that would follow the story until her body turned up. Change channels when the news played the money shot of the grieving parents. He could shut his ears to the stories of the unspeakable things done to her when the wrong people found her alone and defenceless. He could hear how wonderful she was … bright … promising … How she wouldn’t have hurt a fly and a million other clichés that said nothing of the person-shaped hole in the lives of those who loved her. How she didn’t deserve to die so young. How no one deserved to die so fucking young. Like he didn’t know.
“But she doesn’t exist,” Andy said to the empty car. “She doesn’t exist.”
Andy pushed the clutch down and slipped the car into first gear.
“For fuck’s sake.” Andy put the car back into neutral before he turned the engine off. He opened the door, dragging the cool night air inside. “You’d best not be a fucking ghost, you little shit.”
The undergrowth snagged and tugged on Andy’s jeans like he’d expected it to. God knew how she managed it in just a nightie. “Hey, you!” The heady smell of woodland decay hung ripe, stirred up by his clumsy steps. The boggy ground threatened to claim his shoes. The nearly full moon broke through the canopy, showing him a path while it kept her illuminated.
The girl stared at the ground and continued to shake. If she made a sound, the crunch of Andy’s clumsy steps drowned it out. The closer he got to her, the less she looked like a ghost. “Girl! I—arghhh!” A barbed vine hooked into his cheek and dragged a streak of fire across his face. A bit too late now, but he still raised his forearms to prevent any more brambles doing the same. His pulse quickened, sweat lifting beneath his collar, and he fought to suppress his frustration. “Girl! Listen to me!”
Surrounded by trees and shadows, the moon might have lit a path for Andy, but it did little to reveal the details of his current environment. Anything could have been hiding in the gloom. Even more reason to get the girl out of there. Besides, he shouldn’t be afraid of what he couldn’t see. He’d left his fears of monsters beneath the bed and wardrobe trolls behind with pee-soaked mattresses and his four times table. She needed him. Nothing else mattered.
“I’m getting closer to you.” Twigs and branches snapped, and wayward thorns remained in Andy’s trousers, scratching his legs. An elephant would have tracked her with more grace, but as long as he caught up.
The closer Andy got to the girl, the more the moon failed him. Where it had been a spotlight, the clouds above first tinted the lens and now buried it. Good job she chose to wear white. He kept his focus on the child. To take in the encroaching hostility surrounding him would rob him of his forward momentum.
No more than two metres between them now. “Hey, little girl, what’s going on? Why are you out here?”
A metre and a half away, his torso itched with sweat. “Where are your parents?”
The girl stopped. Andy halted too, deafened by the pant of his own quickened breaths. It had been a long time since he’d done any physical exercise. Trudging through life had been enough of a challenge over the past three years; now he couldn’t even climb a set of stairs without getting breathless. He shook with adrenaline, his legs buzzing from the fresh cuts.
After about thirty seconds, Andy stepped closer. No more than a metre separated them. “Girl, where are your parents?”
Filthy hair, her nightie covered in dirt and filled with holes. Her skin so pale, she looked starved of vitamin D. Like she’d spent her life living underground. She kept her face hidden. Now she’d stopped, she shook more than ever. He needed to get her into the warm car and take her to the police.
Close enough to reach out and touch her, Andy kept his hands at his sides. “Excuse me, why are you out here? What’s going on?”
Andy took slow steps, walking around so he stood in front of her, expecting her to burst to life at any moment. He hunched down and placed a hand on one of her folded arms, fighting the urge to withdraw at the icy touch of her skin. As dirty from the front, her matted hair hung in filthy dreadlocks.
Slowly, the girl lifted her head, her long blonde hair parting to reveal her small face. A button nose, cracked lips, and bright blue eyes. Thick white strips sat beneath her irises as if the weight of her woes dragged on the lower half of her face. She shook her head, her quiet voice croaky like she hadn’t used it for the longest time. “I wish you hadn’t followed me.”
Andy’s brain throbbed, stinging with every beat of his pulse as if it had swollen to be too large for his skull. His eyes were ready to crack and run down his cheeks like egg yolk. And he welcomed it. He’d go blind to stop the pain. While lying in the foetal position, he held his forehead and squinted to take in his poorly lit surroundings. But even the gloomy environment stung his eyes.
When the pain eased a little, he gasped. He’d best make the most of the respite between the paralysing waves. Several blinks helped Andy piece together his surroundings. He shivered, the cold from the stone floor permeating his body.
Andy fought against his dizziness and slowly sat up. A hand against the damp wall—the sandstone leaving cold grit against his palm—he waited for everything to settle down. Whatever they’d injected him with, it still ran through his system. His head spun and nausea clamped his stomach. He shot out a weak cough to try to clear the burn of bile on the back of his throat.
As Andy’s consciousness returned, another pain surfaced. Like his headache, it throbbed in time with his pulse. With anything a few metres outside his field of vision still blurred, he looked down at his right thigh, frowning as if it would help him understand his situation. They’d cut the leg from his jeans, and a white bandage had been wrapped from his knee to his groin. A dinner-plate-sized bloodstain glistened on the fabric.
He drew a sharp breath through clenched teeth, his stomach plummeting. Despite the deep sting, whatever they’d injected him with took the edge off the agony. God help him when it wore off.
Andy’s sight had cleared enough to reveal a barred door locking him in the small room. The glint of a new padlock subdued any thought of escape. A small wooden bench sat at the other end against the far wall. It looked like the room hadn’t been used in years. More a dungeon than a prison cell, the place belonged in the dark ages.
A tiny window above the bench let in a small amount of light from the bright moon. Andy trembled as he got to his feet and shuffled to the back of his cell. The window sat in a crumbling wooden frame that had bloated with damp. One hard whack would drive the glass and frame clear of the hole. For what good it would do; they’d have to cut a lot more of him away before he’d fit through a gap that small.
His vision improving, Andy looked back at the barred door. A walkway separated him and another locked cell. It had someone inside, hidden in the shadows. He hobbled across the small space, leaned against the cold bars keeping him locked in, and gasped. A prisoner like him, the small girl from the woods stared straight back. “You bitch,” he hissed. “You did this to me.”
The same listless and sunken eyes he’d seen in the woods, the girl’s jaw worked like a cow’s. Dirt stained her pale skin, and blood coated her maw. The same white bands of depression lit up the bottom of her blue irises.
When she lifted something to her mouth and took a bite, the air left Andy’s lungs. Her small hand clung onto a clump of raw meat. The pain in his thigh flared up again and it took him a few seconds to find his words. “Are you eating me?”
The slapping of the
girl’s lips filled the silence between the two cells. She chewed then swallowed before taking another bite from the small chunk of flesh. Every wet squelch twisted Andy’s stomach. The desire to scream at her ran tension through his body, tightening every fibre of his being. Yet he stood there transfixed, captivated by her blank expression.
Had she not already spoken to him in the woods, Andy would have assumed she couldn’t. Very few synapses appeared to be firing behind her glazed stare. “What is this place?”
The girl looked to her left, and Andy followed her line of sight. The dirty corridor between them ended with a set of stone stairs leading out of their basement dungeon. “I don’t know where we are.”
Andy jumped back from the girl’s words, his thigh sending a searing warning that he shouldn’t try such sharp movements a second time.
“We move from place to place,” she said, “and never stay anywhere long. We need to keep ahead of the police.”
Maybe the sudden movement had made it worse, or maybe the anaesthetic had started to wear off; either way, the deep throb in Andy’s thigh ran even deeper as if straight to the bone. He pushed his words out. “What are they going to do with me?”
The girl took another bite of his thigh and chewed.
“Stupid question, I suppose.”
No matter what she said, the girl delivered it with the same monotone, her features fixed as if the muscles animating her face had shut down. “You don’t have long left. Now we’ve started, we’ll eat you in the next few days.”
“Who are we?”
For the first time, the girl’s face changed, her eyes widening ever so slightly. “Bad people. Very bad people.”
“How did you end up with them?”
“They aren’t all bad. They used to have a nice lady.”
“Huh?”
“She taught me everything. She learned me to speak. She said I was born, but no one ever knew I was born.”
“You weren’t born in a hospital?”
“No hospital.”
“And you didn’t go to school?”
“No school. Just here. With them.”
“The bad people?”
“Apart from the nice lady.”
“So the authorities don’t know you exist?”
“Authorities?”
“What happened to the nice lady?”
“She’s gone. Gone the same way everyone goes. Gone the same way you’ll go.” The girl dropped her attention to Andy’s bandaged thigh and wetted her lips with the tip of her tongue. Her cheeks were hollow, her face withdrawn. From the look of her wiry arms and legs, were she naked at that moment, Andy was sure he’d see every bone in her body.
“You ate her too?”
The girl dropped her gaze to the floor while Andy tightened his grip on the cold bars. The shiny padlock glinted in the weak light. His head spun and the bandage grew damper with every passing second. If he didn’t hold on, he’d crumple where he stood. After a few seconds of waiting for the girl to look up, he released a hard sigh, shook his head, and said, “My god.”
If she spoke the truth, and Andy certainly believed she spoke the truth, then she didn’t know any better. A child raised to be a cannibal couldn’t be blamed for their actions, as abhorrent as they were. Beautiful blue eyes, long blonde hair, delicate features. She couldn’t have been any older than about ten. Too young to know any different. He should focus on that rather than the horrific experience of watching someone eat him. “What’s your name?”
“They call me Worm.”
“Worm?”
Again, she responded as if she had no attachment to the words. “They say they go fishing with me. I’m the worm. The bait. They make me walk through dark places in the middle of the night. Scary places. Although I quite like them because it means I get out. One day I’m going to run. The kind lady said I should. She said as soon as I get a chance, I should run like the wind.”
“So why haven’t you?”
“They heard her.”
“And that’s why they killed her?”
A tilt of her head to one side, the girl said, “Yes.”
“And you don’t have a real name?”
“Worm.”
The rattle of a freeing padlock silenced them. The shadow at the top of the stairs made it impossible to see what came their way as the hinges on the old wooden door creaked.
Andy stepped back into the shadows, leaned against the sandstone wall, and slid down it to the cold and hard floor. He rolled over into the foetal position, lying on a gritty layer of chipped stone and dirt. He shuffled once or twice before the searing burn in his thigh pulled his attention away from the mild discomfort beneath him.
The angry incessant buzz in Andy’s leg grew worse as footsteps descended the stone stairs. It dared him to move. Just the smallest shift to ease his pain. But they were too close. Better they believed him to still be unconscious.
The steps continued with a slow and deliberate purpose. They taunted Andy, daring him to look. His back to the cell door, he pressed his eyes closed and did what he did best: he lay down, ready to take whatever came his way. No wonder Chesky had ended it. How could she love such a passive wimp?
The footsteps reached the bottom of the stone stairs and walked along the narrow corridor. Each click of a heel against the hard floor chipped away at Andy’s resolve, daring him to look. Just once. They wouldn’t notice.
Andy suppressed a flinch when keys rattled directly outside his cell. The click of the released padlock and then a yawn from the opening metal door followed.
Grit popped beneath each step as the person moved to within a metre of Andy. They breathed heavily as if the small walk to check on him had taken its toll.
Relaxing the tight squeeze on his eyes as the boots walked around in front of him, Andy fought to maintain his even breaths. The rich scent of damp boot leather just millimetres from his face, they’d shatter his nose with one hard kick.
The person lifted the foot closest to him. The cold, hard press of a gritty sole pushed into his right cheek. But he remained passive and kept his focus on the sensation in his thigh. Although the person leaned some of their weight against Andy’s face, they halted before the pain made him yell.
The pressure lifted and Andy focused on his breaths. In and out, in and out. Slow and measured like that of someone who’d been drugged.
The footsteps retraced their gritty path from his cell. Andy anticipated the slamming door and resisted his need to flinch as the mocking metallic cackle tore through the building beyond. After the click of the padlock being resecured, the steps walked away and ascended the stairs.
A baritone voice yelling through the building beyond confirmed it to be a man. “He’s still out. I’ll check on him again later.”
When Andy finally opened his eyes, long after the door at the top of the stairs had been shut and locked, he rolled over and gasped to find the girl fixed on him. “They prefer to eat people when they’re alive,” she said. Hunger burned as the only glow in her bland stare. Maybe she preferred it too. “They often take a sample.” She licked her cracked lips. “But then they hold out. It excites them for what’s to come. They say meat tastes much better if you’re listening to it scream.”
Andy didn’t know how much time had passed since the girl revealed his fate. Eaten alive. If there was an appropriate response, he hadn’t yet found it. Besides, he had more immediate concerns. Every time it felt like the anaesthetic had worn off, the burn in his thigh rose to an entirely new level, a molten spear being pressed deeper into his leg with every fresh wave.
While Andy rode out the agony—his brow sodden with sweat—the girl said, “Do you have any children?”
She’d lusted after his living flesh and now she wanted to make small talk? What did she want to do next, discuss the weather? Make a joke about two buses turning up at once?
After about thirty seconds, the girl asked again, “Do you have any children?”
“So I’m
lying here, waiting for them to eat me alive—waiting for you to eat me alive—and you’re asking me about my family?”
The same detached stare regarded him.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “No, I don’t have any children.”
The padlock on the door at the top of the stairs snapped open again, cutting their conversation short.
Maybe the same person who visited him the last time, maybe not. Either way, they followed the same routine: entering Andy’s cell before pressing the cold, hard, and gritty sole of their boot against his face.
Like before, Andy lay there, tolerating the sting from the boot against one cheek, and the sting from the cold concrete against the other.
Once the guard left, Andy sat up slowly. The little girl continued to stare at him. “My wife and I have just split up. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but I was thinking about killing myself when I saw you in the woods. I was driving towards a row of trees with my seatbelt off. I feel like I made the wrong decision.”
“Why would you kill yourself?”
Not only did Andy have a thousand fire ants feasting on his thigh, but his hips ached from sitting on the hard floor. He rocked from side to side in an attempt to find some relief. “Life got too hard.” When he looked at the girl, he laughed. “Probably difficult for you to understand, right? I mean, look at the fucking life you’ve had to live. How can I say my life’s shit?”
The girl’s expression remained blank. She couldn’t have been any older than ten, but she had a resilience in her maudlin stance that would take Andy a century or more to develop. His pasty and pale frame, his pudgy hands, his apathy for life when it got hard. How pathetic. She’d experienced things he couldn’t even comprehend. “You know what?” he said. “I’m not going to lie down and take this anymore. We need to get you out of here.”
The Girl in the Woods: A Ghost's Story (Off-Kilter Tales Book 1) Page 3