The Taken (3 page)

One finger teased her bottom lip as she spoke.

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“She was a beautiful little girl. So perfect to look at. Of course, things that look so right invariably aren’t. They can’t be. Something is normally broken inside.” She looked up at Alex directly this time, her eyes almost too full of clarity. “Like your mother. So gifted, so talented.” Her gaze drifted to the grand piano that had been an ornamental relic since its owner had wasted away in the cottage at the other end of the village twenty-three years ago.

“And yet so unmeant to be.”

Unmeant to be. Alex felt the fear of reality biting at her stomach and pushed it back, down into the very pit of herself, where it had lived and grown each day for months. She felt Simon’s blue eyes fighting through the enveloping gloom to reach her, but didn’t acknowledge him. Pity would be plentiful soon enough; she didn’t want or need any extra now. Her mother was just a vague, elusive memory.

A phantom. Mary and Paul, they were who’d raised her, all she’d ever had until Ian had come along and they’d dared to have dreams of a family of their own.

Well, Ian had turned out to be a spineless bastard and the dreams had been sucked away from her like dust thrown against the wind. Yeah, Mary and Paul—they were all that mattered. There had never really been any space for the ghost of her mother, and certainly not now. She had been gone too long. So much dirt under the ground just a few hundred feet away in the old churchyard.

Paul got up and refilled his glass, his movement awkward and stiff, as if all his muscles were taut. “She wasn’t like Aunt Alicia. N-n-n-not like her at all.”

Shaking her head, Mary stared at her son’s back.

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“Maybe not, but she was damaged all the same.” Her eyes misted over, drawn back to the night outside. “She went missing on the day of that storm thirty years ago. No one ever found her. She disappeared as if she’d never existed. Most people decided she must have fallen into the river and drowned, but no one ever knew for sure. No body, no solution.” Her breath seemed labored for a second.

“All they found was one of her shoes. A red sandal. On the steep bank on the edge of the woods. It was amazing it wasn’t washed away.”

Alex’s heart contracted. “Poor thing. No one should have to die alone and afraid. Especially a child.” Her voice was barely above a whisper as she imagined the icy water beating the small girl into unconsciousness before sucking her into its fluid depths, any small cries for help lost in the rage around her. “She must have been terrified.”

“Yes, she must.” Mary nodded, but even through the shadows the satisfied, smug expression that seemed so contrary to the words was visible on her haggard face.

“Yes, she must.” For a long moment she said nothing more, the silence filled only with the rattle of nature at the windows, invisible greedy fingers seeking out any gap in the defenses of their fragile stronghold of brick and thatch.

“It was her I saw in the garden today. Melanie Parr. She’s come back.”

Paul spun round, taking angry strides toward his mother’s shrunken figure, one shaking hand pointing at her. “No! That’s not possible. She’s dead.” He grabbed Mary’s shoulders. “She died thirty years ago. Jesus Christ, Mum!”

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Only one step behind him, Simon gently but firmly pulled Paul back to the sofa.

“Take it easy, mate. Take it easy.” Despite his apparent calm, Alex knew that her cousin’s friend must have been shocked at his outburst. He had to be. She was. She’d never seen him act like that.

He’s scared. Scared half to death. She watched Paul let out a deep trembling breath. Yeah, that’s scared to death. That’s something I can recognize. Why should he be so afraid? He should be calming his mother down, not adding to the hysteria.

Mary, however, seemed unaware of her son’s protests as her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I should have known it was her. The minute I saw that shoe. I should have known. She said the Catcher Man brought her back.” Her smile was edged with a frown.

Sitting on the edge of the settee, Simon leaned forward, the fingers of his large hands linking together. “Who’s the Catcher Man?”

Despite himself, Alex could see he was getting drawn into the story. He was, after all, a journalist. Stories were their life’s blood, and when he’d spoken this time, like the professional he was, he’d stolen the question from her lips.

“The Catcher Man doesn’t exist,” Paul said. “A long time ago he was a pagan figure that women who were having difficulty getting pregnant would go out in the rain and do various rituals to in order to conceive. But over the centuries his myth changed until he became something parents used to control their kids.

Like a bogeyman. Don’t wander off or the Catcher Man will get you. He steals lost children and then they’re never found. That kind of thing. Silly stuff to make you

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behave.” Paul just sounded tired now, as if his small outburst had drained his reserves.

Slightly confused, Alex scanned the memories of her childhood. “I don’t remember that one.”

“You wouldn’t, dear. After Melanie Parr disappeared no one wanted to tell it anymore. The threat had become real, you see. It appeared as if the Catcher Man had come to life. That’s what the children thought and they were scared enough after that. We didn’t need the story anymore. We didn’t have the stomach for it.”

Paul placed his empty glass on the coffee table in front of him. “Anyway, none of this matters. Whatever or whoever it was you saw in the garden, it wasn’t Melanie Parr. She’s been gone for thirty years. Dead and gone, more than likely.”

Alex glared at Paul, annoyed and confused by this sudden stranger beside her, before speaking softly herself.

“He’s right, you know, Mary. It couldn’t have been that little girl. There are no such things as ghosts.” She swallowed hard, her mouth dry. “The dead are gone. You know that.”

Her aunt’s laugh drifted pity across to her. “Are they, Alex? Are they really?

The ghosts live inside us; that’s what I think. The dead never really leave us in peace.” Her voice floated away, as if disembodied. “Sometimes, they feel so close I’m not sure where they end and we begin.”

Alex shivered despite herself, and she was sure that next to her, Paul did the same.

“I don’t think this sitting around in the dark is doing any of us any good.”

Simon had stood up and made his way to the far wall, flicking on the switches and filling

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the room with the relief of light. This time Mary didn’t protest, but blinked, confused. Simon retook his seat and leaned forward.

“Listen, Mary. Alex and Paul are right. There are no such things as ghosts. But people do play tricks. Stupid tricks.” He held his gaze steady, and Alex could see that he was calming her aunt with just his easy manner and gentle honesty.

“Would anyone in the village want to play a trick on you? Do any of the children know about Melanie Parr’s disappearance? Is there any way they could have found out about it recently? Kids can find all the wrong things funny sometimes.”

“No. No one knows. No one could know. No one talked about it. Not after. It was easier to forget it ever happened.” Mary smiled at some private joke squirming inside her. “We forgot it ever happened.”

Moving to the chair, Alex sat on the arm and took her aunt’s cold hand and slowly rubbed some warmth into it. “It’ll all seem better in the morning. Once this storm has passed. It’s too easy to be afraid in the dark.” She knew the truth in those words only too well. Since sleep had started deserting her, she and the night had formed an uneasy truce, but despite their growing familiarity, she often felt terror gnawing at her in those silent hours spent listening to time ticking by. Feeling the chill in her heart and her aunt’s hand, staring out at the storm, she knew that some things didn’t get better in daylight. They just hid themselves well.

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It wasn’t long after that conversation that they’d all headed off to bed, leaving the storm to continue without its audience. The atmosphere amongst them had changed after the conversation about the missing girl, and Alex was too tired to either deal with or think about Paul’s sudden black mood. Whatever had happened with that Melanie Parr all those years ago had obviously affected him more than he was willing to let on, but if he didn’t want to talk about it then that was up to him. She was sure they’d all feel better in the morning.

Swallowing two more tablets of morphine, she crawled beneath her duvet. Well, all of them but her, that was. There would be no feeling better for her. Maybe an occasional “feeling better than yesterday,” or “better than last week,” but there was no getting better in her future. It was a downward slope ahead; the doctor had been particularly clear on that point. For the millionth time of the day, she bit back the panic and

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the tears and the self-pity until they settled down in the pit of her gut, not quite gone, but manageable.

You’re still here now, girl. That’s all that matters. One day at a time.

The duvet was cool as she pulled it under her chin, although the air in the room was muggy. Normally she would sleep with the window open, enjoying the feel of any breeze, especially on the warm summer nights. It was funny the simple things that she had learned to value, to appreciate for the first time after a lifetime of barely being aware of their existence, and a gentle breeze on a hot night was one of those things.

The air felt funny and she could smell the dampness in it, but it wasn’t the normal clean damp of the country; it tasted almost dirty as she breathed it through her mouth. But then, maybe that was just the morphine, another one of its weird side effects. Sometimes, more and more as the days passed, she would get strange sensations in her skin, as if maybe a cat had brushed against her leg or someone was gently squeezing her arm, but there would be nothing there.

Nothing but just another sign that her body was breaking down. Every day it seemed there was something new to deal with and soon she wasn’t going to be able to hide it from people, especially Mary. She wasn’t looking forward to that.

That switch from being normal to being other in everyone else’s eyes. Someone to be treated differently. Someone dying. As if it were never going to happen to them. But then, she’d never really contemplated it happening to her until it did. Life was like that. A motherfucker that kicked you in the face when you least expected it. Swearing was another thing that she’d learned to appreciate.

The sheer rebelliousness of it helped with the fear.

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Unmeant to be. That’s what Mary had said about her mother. Was that the legacy that Alicia had passed through her blood to Alex? The doctor had said that the cancer hadn’t been hereditary, but who really knew. Maybe it was all just in the blood, little genetic time bombs waiting to go off when you least expect it. It had happened to her mother and now it was happening to her. The morphine and sedative were taking hold and for the first time in a long time, as she drifted into her restless sleep, she allowed her mind to wonder about the dead woman buried in the churchyard so very close, and just as she passed into unconsciousness Alex thought she could see her in a faded memory laughing over her bed. Or on reflection, maybe she was crying. There wasn’t enough time to decide which before the blackness overwhelmed her.

“Don’t you remember me? I couldn’t move my legs. Look how they move now!”

Alex woke up with a start, her breath caught in her throat, her eyes immediately glancing around in the gloom for whatever had disturbed her. What was that? What had woken her so suddenly? Her hair sticking to her scalp with sweat, she pushed it out of her face as she sought out the glowing hands of the clock beside her bed. Three o’clock in the morning. Fuck. Her breathing slowing, she lay back down on the pillow, waiting for her internal disquiet to ease.

It must have been another dream. As if she weren’t getting enough of those these days. Another side effect of the drugs were the nightmares. They normally involved people trying to bury her when she was dead, pushing her back into a coffin and whispering, “Relax,

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your time is up,” and her screaming back at them that she was fine, she was still there, right up until they nailed the lid down and she would wake up, stifling a scream. Yeah, morphine couldn’t kill all your pain; that was for sure.

The air still felt heavy and her mouth felt furry. Pushing herself up on her elbow, she took a sip from the water that had warmed in the glass by the bed. It was odd that she didn’t remember the dream, though. Shaking some of her sleepiness away, she waited for her body to calm down. It wasn’t real. Whatever had woken her wasn’t real, just her ridiculous drug-fueled imagination. Still, she thought, lying back down, maybe not remembering was a blessing sometimes.

There was only so much terror a girl could take. She could hear the rain still beating hard at the window, aggressively tossed at the glass by the wind. Maybe that was what had woken her. Or maybe Paul or Simon had got up to use the bathroom. The thought of the house full of other people was a comforting one, and she shut her eyes to try and get at least another two or three hours sleep.

The giggle came from the other side of the room, a little girl’s laugh, and this time Alex sat bolt upright. What the fuck was that? Her heart began to pick up the pace again and her head darted to the noise as the lilting laugh came again, this time from her wardrobe. And then a few moments later from outside the window. Her spine rigidly straight, it felt as if she couldn’t breathe, let alone move, but Alex could feel sweat forming on the palms of her hands as she gripped her duvet, ears straining. It was the drugs; that’s what it was. It had to be. The morphine playing tricks on her.

For a few long seconds there was only the steady 29

beat of the water on the window and her heart pounding; then lightning flashed angrily outside, illuminating the emptiness of the room. It’s just the morphine, see. No more chuckles coming from the wardrobe. Get a grip on yourself. She fought back the urge to giggle herself, but then came the second flash of lightning, lighting up the room again, forming a halo around the little boy that stood at the end of her bed, one finger over his lips.