‘Of course not
! But that doesn’t mean someone else hasn’t.’
Ian shook his head.
‘Like who? Who has he come into contact with? Who could have told him?’
Red frowned.
‘I don’t know, someone in the pub? Someone at the B&B?’
‘You told me yourself he was sat alone in the pub.
And it’s hardly breakfast table conversation, is it?’
Red shook his head.
Ian frowned. ‘What if he really did see someone upstairs with a baby? There were no women with babies at the house earlier that I remember.’
Red’s hands bunched into fists, his anger directed at a new, as yet unidentified foe.
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’
Ian nodded.
‘Yes. That we seriously need to find my son. We’ll take it from there. But first, we need to know who he saw.’
###
Bethany’s Diary,
June 15th, 1990
A terrible thing happened last night. Dad came into my room, and started to hunt through my things as I lay in bed. He shouted at me, and I could smell alcohol on his breath. I was too scared to move. He went straight over to my dressing table, and I knew he was looking for something. When I saw what it was, though, I wanted to scream at him, tell him to stop, but I couldn’t. I just sat still, the bedclothes wrapped over my knees, and watched.
He found them.
He found my diaries.
In the secret place under the floorboard in the corner, tucked under the hot water pipes that keep them warm in winter.
He must have known they were there, must have found them already, for he went straight to the dresser, hauled it back, and pulled up the loose board underneath.
I shook my head at him to stop, but he ignored me.
He scooped them all up in his arms and marched out of my room.
I waited for him to go and then followed him down into the kitchen.
An empty bottle stood on the table, and I knew he was drunk. He would never do it otherwise, I know he wouldn’t. Well, he took them all down into the kitchen, opened up the stove and tossed them in, then stood there for some time, watching them burn. I watched him from the doorway, and don’t think he saw me, otherwise he looked crazy enough that he might throw me in there too. After a while, I went back up to my room.
I cried under the sheets for a while, sad that so many books – there must have been ten or twelve – had been stolen and burnt.
I don’t know what got into Dad, but from now on I’ll have to be careful.
So many memories taken from me.
After a while I plucked up the courage to sneak over to the hole in the floor, lift the board, look in, look around. There, at the back, I found one book he had missed, the oldest one, dating back five or six years.
From now on I’ll find another place to hide them, another place where no one will find them.
I know a few places; I’ll decide tomorrow.
Terribly sad, I flicked over the pages of the book, worn and with corners all dog–eared, reading my awful handwriting – at least it
’s got better since then! The book dates back to when Mummy first died, 1984. Of course, I didn’t realise at the time, and it seems strange reading about how I used to see her at the window, watching me, how I’d follow her footprints in the snow. Funny how I thought she was still alive, and living out there, when all the time, according to Dad, she’s been buried in the ground.
Even stranger, though, that I keep seeing her.
Watching me through my window, waiting for me out in the snow. She seems so real even now I know that’s not really her, that’s just something else. Perhaps she’s not really dead, or only a little bit dead, and a bit of her has been left behind. Whatever, I know she wants me to go with her, go out to her in the snow and be with her forever.
After tonight I don’t think Dad can really love me, so one day, maybe, I will.
I just don’t know how yet.
5
Matt stumbled several times, falling over completely twice, the second time landing face down in the shallow waters of the stream, the icy water like a sharp wake up call at boot camp.
He pushed himself to his feet. He was soaked through, and his fingers found a cut had opened above his left eye. He must have struck his face on the smooth pebbles at the bottom of the stream, but his face felt so numb he couldn’t tell for sure, the only certainty being the blood that stained his vision red.
He wiped it away with a damp sleeve and stumbled on up towards the house.
He glanced behind him for signs of pursuit, expecting any moment to feel Red’s rough hands on his shoulders pulling him backwards, a huge fist slamming into his face.
What cruel trick were they playing on him
? Their innocent ignorance, their stubborn denial of his claims. Sick, unfair.
They knew.
And Matt knew they knew. About the girl. About the baby.
The way Red had struck him, he may as well have held up a neon sign admitting his guilt.
And his father, what could he possibly gain from all this?
Matt barely considered that his own conclusions might be wrong.
He wasn’t seeing things, surely? He had lost a lot of his sanity over the last few hours, but even blind drunk he wasn’t that crazy.
He cried out with relief when the house finally loomed up before him, rising up from b
eyond the garden, a grey, antiquarian monolith filled with secrets. The ascent out of the valley had exhausted him and the sight of any building would have been welcome, even one which held the shadows of his little sister’s face in every window.
Still unsure of what he was looking for
, Matt headed into the house.
An eerie silence filled the rooms and corridors, and he stood still a while, listening for the sound of movement upstairs.
He heard nothing but a thick, almost tangible silence.
She must be here somewhere, he thought.
Where else would she go? She lives here after all.
He climbed the stairs to the second floor, moving past his own rooms and heading for Bethany’s.
He winced when a floorboard creaked just outside the door and froze, grimacing. But nothing, no sound of movement came from inside. Where
was
she?
He reached the door and tried the handle.
It was locked, but age had made these thick pine doors brittle. To hell with being quiet, he thought, stepped back and aimed a kick squarely below the lock. His aim was poor, and his foot struck the lower edge of the door handle, but it was enough to cause a sharp cracking sound, and after a second kick the door burst inwards, banging against the wall behind.
Matthew stepped inside, bracing himself for confrontation.
Empty. Not even old furniture, the kind you always saw in horror movies, covered over with sheets. The bed had gone, her cupboards, dresser, bookshelves, always so distressingly empty of books. As though Bethany’s life was a slate now wiped clean.
Something about the starkness of her room horrified Matt.
They had tried to erase her presence, as though he had never had a sister at all.
He remembered his own room, untouched after all these years.
He walked across to the window and peered out at the back garden of the house. There was no sign of his father or Red, but it would only be a matter of time before they came after him. He looked towards the break in the back hedge where the path began, and thought he noticed a movement in the undergrowth, a shifting of foliage that was too irregular to have been caused by wind. He stepped back quickly, not wanting to be seen, and drunkenly stumbled a few extra steps. Something creaked underfoot, making him gasp.
He looked down and saw a loose board.
He tapped it with his foot, saw how it wasn’t even fixed down. He remembered the layout of her room well enough, and knew her dresser would have once covered this area, keeping this loose board away from uncertain feet and
prying eyes.
He dropped to his knees. His fingers found a grip and he lifted the board up.
He discovered
a small space beneath, cross beams from the ceiling below and the hot water pipes leaving a cubby hole a couple of feet wide. Bethany had never had many possessions, never shown more than a passing interest in any presents they gave her. What she did have had been piled into a box in another corner, a random assortment of what had become junk. But this, this tiny under floor space, struck him as odd. Space for a few keepsakes, perhaps.
He heard a sound from downstairs, someone shouting his name.
Panic filled him. Damn it, they were in the house. He had let himself get preoccupied again.
He stood up, kicked the board back into place, and turned back toward the door.
There had to be some way out, some way past them. A back staircase, a fire escape?
None that he remembered.
He could always hide. But where?
The house was full of closets and walk–in cupboards, cubby holes and cluttered storerooms.
There were perhaps twenty rooms he had only been in once or twice in his whole childhood. He could hide just about anywhere.
He slipped out into the corridor, aware that Bethany’s room would be among the first places they would look.
A stairwell rose to his right, up towards his parents’ old rooms. A chill wind seemed to ghost through his bones at the thought of being up there again, near to where his mother - before
what happened -
had spent a large part of her life.
He didn’t like to think about her.
It hurt too much.
In fact, for the last ten years he had hardly thought about her at all
. He had cut her memory and those of the rest of his childhood off like a log on a chopping block. He no longer needed those memories; they could do nothing but hurt him.
Matt took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to get some distance between himself and them, but at the same time terrified his unsteady feet would bring him clattering back to earth where he would open his eyes to find Red standing over him.
The stairwell was separate from the main staircase that rose through the centre of the house, a small spiral that connected only the third and fourth floors. Each floor had two smaller stairwells, alternating up and down at either end of the house, while the main staircase connecting all the floors rose up through the middle like a central nervous system.
He heard footsteps somewhere below him, echoing through the empty hallways.
His father had never been one for clutter. Even carpets and drapes were rare, but since Matt had left, from what he could see the barrenness of the place had begun to inch its way down from the top floors, as though his mother’s death had left behind a lingering sickness, slowly sucking the house dry of colour and life until one day soon nothing would be left but a skeleton, dead and empty.
Suddenly Matt doubted his choice.
Up seemed worse than down – at least there was life downstairs; up brought only painful memories.
‘Mother,’ he whispered, moving quietly down the corridor.
A shroud of silence seemed to descend around him, as though he had walked through a curtain into the world of the dead. The air turned suddenly stale,
empty
, as though its goodness had all been breathed in, leaving nothing for Matt as the corridor’s dry miasma scratched at his throat.
He reached the door to the room his
parents had once shared. A coating of dust covered the upper side of the handle, and his fingers lingered, unsure.
Go on
.
He gripped and twisted, winced at the creak the door made,
and was sure the shouts from downstairs adopted a sudden urgency. Not allowing himself to think, he slipped inside.
He hadn’t been in this room
for twenty years or more. When she had still been alive he had not come here often, afraid, no –
wary
of her, of the elegant, beautiful woman from whom he had descended. As enigmatic as his mute sister but lacking the same sinister sheen, he had stayed away unless she came to him. Of course, in her last few years, after she became sick, those times had been few and far between.
Cancer, he assumed, looking back now.
At least it gave a label to something no longer able to be labeled. Time had blurred the memories he still retained of her, to the extent where he remembered her as a persona rather than as a defined image; even in her last years he hadn’t been able to see her clearly, as though
she had not wanted to be seen
. He could remember only her grace, the way she moved, the soft lilt in her voice, and sometimes, that was enough. His mother had substance, she had
aura
, she existed as clearly as he needed, her beauty welcoming him to erase the darkness of her last years from his mind.