Glimpse (5 page)

I folded my arms and glowered at the packing boxes in the corner. I might have been a pushover six weeks ago, but I wasn’t any more. I was the girl who attacked Glimpses now.

I was also the girl who still had Glimpses.

My throat tightened like I was going to cry. I scrunched up my face, refusing to let any tears fall.

Grabbing the nearest packing box, I channelled my frustration into unpacking its contents. For ten minutes I was a whirlwind. I flung suitcases onto the bed in the middle of the room, making the wooden headboard bang against the wall. From there, I threw my possessions into semi-organized heaps around the room. The wardrobe was Scott’s face as I lobbed my collection of vintage shoes into it. The chest of drawers was Crowley’s fat stomach as I punched a pile of biographies down onto it.

I hung up a few of my favourite dresses, and closed the wardrobe door, revealing my Normality List, where I’d tacked it. I scanned it and frowned. ‘No nightmares’. ‘No Glimpses’. ‘Stop worrying Dad’. ‘Get friends’. I’d failed at all of those today.

But it was ‘Get friends’ that taunted me most. With Scott at the inn as well as at school, I was going to have to be on my best behaviour twenty-four hours a day. Even if he wasn’t as bad as Derek, he had only to hear me screaming my head off again, tell his mates at school about it, and I could kiss my dream of ‘seeming normal’ goodbye.

I had to talk to Dad.

I followed the familiar sound of the TV downstairs to the kitchen. In our old house, the tinny blare had filled every room, every hour of the day that Dad was awake. When I’d lain in my bed above the living room, I could almost follow Dad’s shows word for word. But here the sound was smaller, muffled by the inn’s thick walls, as if the TV was intimidated by its new surroundings.

A bizarrely familiar scene met me in the kitchen – packed shopping bags standing on a kitchen table, Dad peering at me from over the back of his sofa. But the table was twice the size of the one we’d left behind on Saturday morning; and Dad was over on the other side of the cavernous kitchen instead of in the boxy living room I was used to.

‘Liz, how was your day?’

I’d had a dozen things I’d wanted to tell him when I got home – about the two-hour-long assembly the whole school had been subjected to; about the choice of food in the dining hall; about Susie helping me find 12G – but none of those things seemed important now.

‘Good.’ I shrugged.

‘Glad to hear it.’ Dad gestured at the TV with the remote. ‘This is over in a couple of minutes. I’ll help with the shopping then, okay?’

I nodded. I knew the routine. I grabbed one of the shopping bags, wiped the rain off a bag of pasta, and chose a cupboard out of the vast array to put it in.

Everything about this new house was excessive. Not all the rooms were as big as this one, most were quite poky and small, but there was too much of everything – too much dust, too much furniture, too many rooms. I wondered how Mum had coped moving to a normal-sized house when she’d married Dad.

The moment the end credits rolled on the TV, I turned around. ‘So,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

Dad paused in the process of clambering off the sofa. ‘Sounds serious.’ He walked over to the table, rubbing his hair, which had dried in thick clumps. ‘There’s not a problem with school already, is there?’

‘School’s fine.’

He looked relieved.

I leaned back against the marble counter. It was cold, even through my wool dress. ‘I want to talk about the caretaker. Mr Crowley. You know he has his son working here with him?’

‘I do.’

‘Well, two caretakers is a bit much, don’t you think?’

Dad rubbed at one of his eyes under his glasses. ‘Crowley told me Scott comes over by choice. We’re not paying him anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s not exactly a second caretaker.’

‘But . . . he kind of is.’ I folded my arms. ‘And Crowley said he’s here all the time. I’m not comfortable with having two strangers around my home.’

‘Scott’s nice. And Crowley’s not a stranger, Liz. He’s been here for years. He was here long before . . . you know. The accident.’ Dad looked down at his hands.

I squeezed the locket at my throat.

‘You won’t remember him,’ Dad said, after a pause, ‘but he was here. Used to chat with your mum when we visited.’

‘Okay,’ I said, more gently. ‘But maybe you can ask him to stick to regular work hours. Just so he’s not here all the time.’ And so Scott can’t be here at all.

To my surprise, Dad seemed to consider it. ‘Well, I suppose that’s reasonable.’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll mention it to him tomorrow, see what he says.’

I exhaled. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

He smiled. Then he scooped up two shopping bags with sudden enthusiasm and joined me at the kitchen side. ‘Are you proud of your old dad, then? Shopping before we even ran out of bread for toast.’

I grinned, and took one of the bags off him. ‘Yeah. I am.’

‘And I picked up a local newspaper to look at the job section.’

‘Wow. Where is my dad and what have you done with him?’

He smiled. ‘I was thinking, you know. I’m so proud of you, trying to make a go of things. Maybe this can be a new start for both of us.’

‘That would be nice.’ I hugged a family-pack of crisps to my chest. ‘Really, really nice.’

He smiled back at me, happy and shy as a kid who’s been given a gold star for their star chart. My heart ached for him suddenly. It was so rare he looked genuinely happy.

He upended a shopping bag on the counter, scattering chocolate bars and packets of biscuits and apples across the marble, along with a sorry trickle of rainwater.

I picked a sodden bag of bread rolls out of the mess. ‘Maybe next time, take a taxi home. Or, even better, since we’re talking about new starts, you could take up driving again?’

My words fell into silence. If they’d been spaghetti, I’d have sucked them back in.

‘Ha,’ Dad said, a beat too late. His grin strained. ‘One step at a time, Liz. One step at a time.’ He gestured at the mess on the kitchen side, and sighed, as if he’d only just realized how much work it was. ‘Leave this. I’ll finish it later, okay?’

He shuffled back to his sofa. I rolled my eyes at my reflection in the microwave door. Good one, Liz.

I finished unpacking as the TV blared with Dad’s next show.

One step at a time. That was the trouble – I wanted it now. I’d once been happy, Glimpse-free, with dozens of friends; after seven years of crazy, I wanted normal again. Dad had once played piano and been a full-time sound engineer; after seven years of grieving for Mum, a string of temp jobs and a full-time TV-watching career, I wanted him to be happy.

But maybe he was right. A little more time, maybe that was all we needed. Maybe tomorrow would be the day I made friends. Maybe tomorrow would be the first in a lifetime of Glimpse-free days.

And maybe tomorrow would be the day Dad forgave himself for driving his car into a tree and killing his wife.

Killing my mother.

Automatically, I reached for my locket, and squeezed.

One step at a time.

The nightmare starts the same as always. I’m standing on a lawn. The breeze ripples the short grass. Wild rabbits chew the stalks warily. Everything’s quiet, but it’s not peaceful. There’s a tension in the air, inside me, like the moment of silence in a horror movie before the axe falls.

I’ve been through this a thousand times. I should know what’s coming. It’s on the edge of my mind. It teeters there, just out of reach.

The axe falls. A screech of metal, the breaking of glass, shatters the silence. Somewhere close by, a child screams. I lift my skirt, and I run.

I see it. The mangled car, forced into the body of a tree; shards of glass, spilt oil and a shower of leaves. Yes, I remember this now.

Without warning, the scene flips. Now I’m inside the car; I am the screaming child. I’m scrunched into the back seat. Something warm and wet is running into my eyes. It doesn’t hurt, but it seems like it should.

The passenger door rips open. My mother! She’s come to help me! I want to cry out to her, but I can’t speak, I can’t move. She reaches into the car for me . . .

And then I see her face. Her features are twisted by violence. She’s angry as a Halloween witch. She snarls at me, her teeth bared. Her eyes bore into me like she wishes I were dead.

If I could cry now, I would. Big, wracking sobs build in my chest as my mother claws at me, tries to dig her nails into my flesh. She can’t get a grip on me. She hauls at me, but I’m a rock. She can’t move me, and I can’t tell her to stop.

‘Get out!’ she screams. Her voice is worse than the sound of ripping metal. ‘Get out, get out, get out!’

Over and over and over she screams. Each word slices my heart as deeply as the wounds that cover me with blood.

My mother hates me.

I gasped awake. The air juddered through my lungs, releasing the pain in my chest. The nightmare had been no worse than usual – I’d lived through it a thousand times since the crash – but it still bruised me every time.

I propped myself up against the pillows and flicked on the bedside lamp. For a moment, I was disorientated to see white walls, unfamiliar furniture, before I remembered where I was.

Strands of hair were plastered to my face. I wiped them away, my hands clammy. My mother . . .

I shook myself. I had to get the nightmare out of my head, and fast. I reached for the locket on my bedside cabinet, and pressed the gold heart between my fingers, feeling the familiar shape of it. I gently cracked it open.

A tiny, heart-shaped photo looked back at me. I knew every detail of it – it was as familiar as my own face in the mirror – but I brought it close to my eyes anyway, and studied it by the glow of the lamp until the hammering in my chest slowed.

A woman in her late twenties held a smiling girl in front of a blue screen painted with clouds. This is my mum, I told myself. This woman, with her arms around me and her loving smile, was my mother. That banshee in my nightmare was not.

Dad had given the locket to me shortly after the accident. He’d told me it had been hers; she’d been the one who’d put the picture of us inside it, she’d been the one who’d kept it close to her heart once.

But she’d never have looked at it for the reason I had to – as an antidote to a nightmare.

Looking at the photo didn’t stop the dreams, didn’t change them – there was no secret hidden in the locket to make my dream-mother love me again – but if I didn’t look at it, all I’d remember would be the monster.

The picture dated from the summer before the accident. Look at the way her arms are wrapped around me. Look at how happy I am, snuggled inside her bear hug.

There was no way to make my mum alive again, but I wished there was a way to stop the imposter of my dreams coming back.

My only hope was that, now I was here, in her childhood home – the place Dad told me I’d visited so often as a child – some of my real memories of her would start to come back.

I closed the locket, sealing my mother, and the little girl I’d once been, inside with a click. I put the necklace gently back on top of the cabinet next to me, scooched down under my duvet, and turned off the lamp.

Crunch.

I froze, my hand still on the lamp switch.

Crunch. Crunch.

I shot upright in bed. My eyes strained in the moonlight. The flashing yellow digits of my alarm clock read ‘02.00’.

I was alert, waiting to hear the sound again. My mind felt like it had been plunged into a bath of cold water, dreamy to red alert in a matter of seconds.

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Something was definitely on the gravel under my window.

Trying not to panic, I slipped first one foot, then the other, down to the floorboards.

It was probably an animal – the inn was bordered with fields and woods. But it would have to be a very heavy animal. Maybe it was the caretaker. Though that wasn’t a good option either.

I stood up. Holding my breath, I inched towards the open shutters, the floorboards cold under my feet.

The old tree filled the night sky, its branches spidering across the moon like black lace. I leaned into the window so I could follow the lines of the vast, black trunk down to the ground.

My heart spasmed with fear.

There was a man there.

A man. Standing under my bedroom window. In the middle of the night.

The figure – yes, it was definitely a man – peeled slowly away from the tree’s shadows. Too slim to be Crowley, too tall to be Scott, too everything to be a Glimpse.

In an instant, he darted towards the wall and I lost sight of him. I could see his shadow though, moving back and forth across the moon-striped gravel as if he was looking for a way in. He could be a burglar. A murderer.

My breath came in shallow bursts. Slowly, quietly, I eased the window open, letting in a sigh of damp night air. I leaned out, as far into the darkness as I dared, trying to see better.

The man stepped back into the open.

I froze, exposed in the window.
Please don’t look up. Don’t look up.

He looked up.

A gasp built and died in my throat. The man – boy – was young, probably just a bit older than me. His green eyes, the only colour in his white face, widened. He leapt back into the tree’s shadows, and was gone.

Vanished.

I slammed the window down and made it to my bed in two leaps, clambering onto it as though it were a life raft on the
Titanic
.

I should get Dad. No. He’d only panic, and not for the reason I’d want him to. It was a bad idea telling him I’d seen something I couldn’t prove had ever been there. I knew that from experience.

For long minutes, I crouched on the bedcovers, straining to listen for more footsteps. When all remained quiet, I climbed back under the duvet and eased myself down, trying not to rustle the sheets.

There was never a good reason for a stranger to be creeping under a girl’s window at two in the morning. I could only hope, now I’d seen him, that whoever it was wouldn’t be back. He was probably one of Scott’s friends. The sooner Dad spoke to Crowley about his work hours, the better.